Me. Bernier of Wisconsin, for example, said she had little trouble with a bill that would grant one ballot to voters in towns like New Berlin, with 40,000 residents, and one to voters in Milwaukee, with 590,000 residents. There were no troughs at all, she noted until government officials made an emergency exception during the pandemic.
“The legislature could say that there is no need for a subject box at all,” she said.
Nathaniel Persily, a political scientist and election expert at Stanford University, said he disagreed. Presidential elections always attract more voters, he said, but the nuisance of democracy often occurs in minor votes for fewer offices where interest is less. In the election, “if there are obstacles placed in the way of voters, it is not going to turn out that way,” he said.
Mike Noble, an expert in Phoenix public opinion, questioned whether the Arizona legislature’s Trump anti-fraud agenda has political legs, even though polls show some Republican faith in Mr. Trump’s stolen election myth he calls ‘staggering’.
Republicans who consider themselves more moderate make up about a third of the party’s support in Arizona, and he will believe the myth much less. And they could be shut down by a lawmaker who wants to restrict absentee ballots in a state where voters – especially Republicans – have long voted by mail.
“I do not see how a rational person would see where the advantage is,” he said.
Some other Republicans seem to agree. In Kentucky, which has the most stringent laws in the country, the Republican State House voted Friday unanimously to allow early voting, even if it’s only three days, and online applications for absentee ballots. Both were first tried during the pandemic and, more importantly, were popular with voters and provincial election officials.
If that kind of recognition of November’s successes in other Republican states resonates, writes Mr. Persily and another election scholar, Charles Stewart III of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a recent study, may well promise to alleviate the deep divisions over future elections. rules. If the stolen election myth drives Republican policy, Mr. Persily said, it could predict a future with two types of elections in which voting rights, participation and confidence in the results would differ significantly, depending on which party wrote the rules. .
“Those trajectories are at hand,” he said. ‘Some states follow a blunderbuss approach to regulating votes only remotely related to fraud. And that could mean huge collateral damage to voting rights. ”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.