Bernier of Wisconsin, for example, said he saw few problems with a bill that would distribute a ballot box to voters in cities like New Berlin, with 40,000 residents, and one to voters in Milwaukee, with 590,000 residents. There were no disposable boxes, she noted, until state officials made an emergency exception during the pandemic.
“The legislature could say that no drop-down boxes are needed,” she said.
Nathaniel Persily, a political scientist at Stanford University and an election expert, said he disagreed. Presidential elections always attract more voters, he said, but democracy’s hard work usually takes place outside of the year for smaller positions, where interest rates are lower. In these elections, “if there are barriers placed in the way of voters, they will not appear,” he said.
Mike Noble, a Phoenix public opinion expert, questioned whether the Arizona Legislature’s Trumpian anti-fraud agenda has political legs, although polls show a level of Republican belief in Trump’s stolen electoral myth, which he calls “dizzying.”
Republicans who consider themselves more moderate make up about a third of the party’s support in Arizona, he said, and are much less likely to believe the myth. And they can be turned down by a legislature that wants to restrict voting ballots in a state where voters – especially Republicans – have long been voting heavily by mail.
“I don’t see how a rational person would see where the benefit is,” he said.
Some other Republicans apparently agree. In Kentucky, which has some of the nation’s most stringent voting laws, the solidly Republican State House voted almost unanimously on Friday to allow early voting, albeit just three days, and online registration for absentee ballots. Both were tried for the first time during the pandemic and, importantly, were popular with county voters and election officials.
If this kind of recognition of November’s successes resonated in other Republican states, Persily and another electoral scholar, Charles Stewart III of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a recent study, this could bode well for easing deep divisions over future elections the rules. If the stolen electoral myth continues to drive Republican politics, Persily said, it could predict a future with two types of elections in which voting rights, participation and faith in the results would be significantly different, depending on which party drafted the rules .
“These trajectories are on the horizon,” he said. “Some states are taking a blunt approach to regulate voting that is only remotely related to fraud issues. And it can mean huge collateral damage to voting rights. “
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.