The 2020 election took place under an unprecedented set of circumstances, and in one sense, at least, it was an inarguable success: More than 150 million people voted in the middle of a deadly pandemic — the highest turnout in more than a century. More than 100 million people voted before Election Day; in Texas, early ballots surpassed the total number of ballots cast in 2016. In many states, largely pandemic-induced modifications to the voting process delivered a preview of what permanent changes to the status quo could look like: extended voter registration deadlines, expanded early voting periods and more access to safe and secure mail-in voting. On a nationwide scale, Americans saw firsthand, for the first time, that exercising their right to vote doesn’t have to be inconvenient.
If this level of participation becomes the norm, it could be disastrous for the Republican Party, which leans on a voter suppression regime meant to prune from the electorate voters whose exercise of the franchise tends to threaten Republican power and influence. Support for more onerous voter ID laws and voter roll purges has become a quasi-official plank of the party platform, often cast as an effort to protect American democracy from the exaggerated threat of voter fraud. (Occasionally, proponents acknowledge it as an anti-democratic political hardball tactic: Recall, in 2012, GOP leader of the Pennsylvania House Mike Turzai predicting that voter ID legislation would “allow Governor Romney to win the state” in that year’s presidential election.) In 2019, shortly before Democrats in the U.S. House passed H.R. 1, a bill that would have (among other things) streamlined voter registration and championed early voting, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) penned a Washington Post op-ed ripping the legislation by dubbing it the “Democrat Politician Protection Act.”
If lawmakers permanently implement some of the measures that made 2020 a more user-friendly election, some in the GOP will look at it as an existential crisis. As Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) put it in a November interview: “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.”
“To my Republican colleagues out there,” he added, “we have to fight back, or we will accept our fate.”
