We need better conversations about democracy reform.
The Republican side is a complete mess. Making it more difficult for citizens to vote has become its top legislative agenda in state after state. Its arguments are based on preventing non-existent fraud, and an apparent belief that if everyone votes, Republicans will never win another election. The party has been moving to make voting more difficult for some time now, but the drive is increasingly unconnected with any empirical evidence that new restrictions will even help it — in other words, it’s moving closer and closer to simply restricting voting as a form of opposing democracy.
That’s most obvious with former President Donald Trump’s continuing obsession with the 2020 election results, and his vendetta against Republicans who accepted the reality that he lost the November election to President Joe Biden. Republicans can pretend that Trump’s effort to overturn that election, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, was compatible with democracy, but it simply wasn’t.
Accepting election results is one of the core requirements in a democratic polity. There’s no “when you just insist on believing without evidence that there was fraud” exception. Or any “attempt to use every institutional lever available to overturn the results” exception. Those Republicans who resisted Trump’s pressure deserve plenty of credit; those who at least accepted the results after Trump lost his court cases and failed to induce state legislatures to intervene deserve, well, a little credit. But that appears to be the minority of the party, and many Republicans seem happy to pass new laws restricting voting rights.
Democrats could also be doing better. Their position tends to be a lot more tethered to facts than the Republican one, and using sloppy logic in defense of democracy is not morally equivalent to using wild accusations and false statements against it.
But they should be making a distinction between minor attempts to make voting harder and extraordinary efforts to undermine democracy. Opposing both is legitimate (and in my view, good policy). Still, it’s hardly unusual for parties to mess with voting rules in order to obtain advantages, and doing so doesn’t immediately threaten popular rule. Indeed, I’ve seen Democrats, too, claim that if absentee voting and other such things are cut back that they’ll never win another election. In fact, as Harry Enten points out at CNN Politics, it’s not clear that Democrats would be hurt at all by some of the Republican efforts.
House Democrats passed a bill that contains a wish list of election reforms without any apparent effort to narrow it either to their highest priority items or to those items with a chance of drawing Republican support — or even strong support from all Senate Democrats. Election law expert Rick Hasen made that argument last week, and he’s correct. In fact, I suspect his suggestion of what Democrats should try to pass is probably still too broad.
There’s nothing wrong with going big when the voters are behind you, as was the case with the pandemic relief act. And it’s at least possible that Democrats are going big on voting rules as part of a bargaining strategy. But my complaint isn’t really about the legislation as much as it is about the rhetoric suggesting democracy is on the line unless every Democratic preference is enacted. That’s simply not the case, including on some reforms — automatic voter registration, for example — that I strongly support and which would make democracy healthier.
Again: There’s no equivalence here. Democrats could do better; Republicans should entirely change course. But it’s leaving us with a debate that hasn’t matched the importance of the topic.
Bloomberg
