The 2020 Presidential Election represents a new era in the breakdown of American Democracy. Although Joe Biden won the presidency, in many states he won by a rather slim margin contrary to what many expected. Combined with the fact that the incumbent president, Donald Trump continued to promote groundless claims of widespread voter fraud, it is no wonder why in the aftermath of the election, many states are introducing new legislation dealing with the ways people vote in elections. In fact, according to the Brennan Center, “legislators have introduced three times the number of bills to restrict voting access as compared to this time last year”. I suggest that these restrictive bills, if passed, would undermine the very fabric of American Democracy by limiting access to voting for all citizens.
Changing how people are able to vote has always been a source of contention in American politics, since it has the ability to subtly but significantly influence which groups turnout to vote. Thus, all new legislation that will affect how people can vote must be carefully reviewed, since a piece of legislation can seem innocuous on paper yet still disenfranchise certain groups. As America’s electorate becomes more diverse, the GOP is going to have a more difficult time winning elections since the majority of their supporters are White. GOP lawmakers are all too aware of this, which is why, under the guise of election security, they are working to disenfranchise low-income voters, who also tend to be individuals of color.
One such bill that introduces such impediments to voting is Arizona’s House Bill 2369, introduced in January 2021. The bill proposes that all voters “shall make and sign affidavit in front of a notary public” in order to make the ballot valid. 80 percent of voters in Arizona cast their ballots by mail or by dropping them off in secure boxes. The proposed requirement would force Arizonans to notarize their ballots, which can cost up to 10 dollars. Even a relatively small fee like this would nevertheless place a price on voting. Additionally, Arizona saw a decrease of more than 30,000 notaries between 2012-2017. This decline in notaries would consequently increase the average distance that voters would have to travel in order to get their ballots notarized. The longer travel to access a notary would in turn increase transportation costs. Thus,, for voters who don’t own cars this notarization requirement would pose a significant barrier to voting . In this way, the notarization requirement would pose an increased burden on those of lower socioeconomic standing relative to those with higher socioeconomic standing. This increased burden can translate into lower voter turnout, which can be the deciding factor in historically contested states like Arizona. House Bill 2369 and similar laws posed by Republican lawmakers are clearly undermining democracy, ironically by utilizing the very mechanisms that make democracy possible . This puts Democrats in a difficult position in their attempts to preserve democracy. They must come up with a satisfactory answer to a pressing question: How does one party effectively neutralize threats to democracy without taking undemocratic measures?
Scholars Levitsky and Ziblatt offer some insight into this topic. In their book, “How Democracies Die”, they write that mutual toleration for one’s political adversary is paramount to the continuation of democracy. As soon as political rivals start to view each other as threats to democracy, they are implicitly stating that the other group no longer has a right to govern. If the democrats assume this about their opponents across the aisle, it would imply that they believe that republicans no longer have a right to govern. However, consolidating political power into one group is inherently undemocratic. Thus, keeping the democratic requirement of mutual toleration in mind, I have the following suggestions.
Firstly, Democrats must make the distinction that the policies that Republicans are advancing hinders democracy, but not directly accuse them of being undemocratic. Separating the issue of democratic erosion from partisan policies is essential to preserving the norm of mutual toleration. It would be easy to accuse democrats of facetiously trying to gain the electoral advantage by hindering Republican policy. This is why Democrats must make a concerted effort to reach out to Republican lawmakers at the federal level and pass a bipartisan bill protecting voting methods (voting by mail and early voting). Even though the Democrats could potentially pass such a bill without republican support passing it with bipartisan support would make it unlikely for new laws to be made in the future undoing progress. Of course, if such efforts are unsuccessful then they must pass the legislation on their own.
Congress has the duty to supervise the manner in which federal elections are held, which allows them to pass legislation that applies to state voting requirements. This power was exercised in the passage of the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. The Voting Rights Act and its following iterations helped to undo many discriminatory practices in the United States when it came to exercising the right to vote. However, in Shelby v. Holder, the Supreme Court declared Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, significantly weakening this legislation. This is why new legislation needs to be passed immediately to safeguard democracy. One such amendment to the Voting Rights Act is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act which would look more critically at requirements for voting. According to the bill, any changes in documentation or qualifications to vote would first be subject to preclearance by the federal government before its implementation. This preclearance would allow an independent committee to evaluate the impact that this additional documentation would have on the electorate. This extra step would greatly diminish the passage of undemocratic voting legislation by state officials. Another piece of legislation that has been proposed is the For the People Act of 2021 which is a direct response to many of the modern challenges that undemocratic legislation is posing to democracy. Within the Act, in Section. 307: Promoting ability of Voters to Vote By mail, it clearly states that “A State may not require notarization or witness signature or other formal authentication (other than voter attestation) as a condition of obtaining or casting an absentee ballot.” If the act were to be passed this would essentially invalidate the law being proposed in Arizona and other laws like it. Considering the fact that democrats currently hold the majority in both the house and the senate, they have the power to push through this piece of legislation without even having to reconcile themselves with their peers across the aisle. To dawdle on this matter is not an option, especially because they only narrowly won majority control of congress. They need to act on this while they have the ability to do so.
Voting has been one of the most hot-button issues in the United States to date. Some may think that for a country that prides itself on liberty and freedom, the US would have an easily accessible voting system. However, the United States has struggled not only with a past of limiting who is allowed to vote but continues with this struggle in the modern day. Our nation first started out with limiting voting exclusively to landowning white males, then gradually expanded rights to all white males, then black men and finally, all men and women. But even with the voting rights act of 1965, states have persisted in finding ways to limit certain individuals from taking full advantage of the right granted them by law. One of the methods that states do this is voter security/ID laws, as Danae Gaytan has correctly identified.
I do think it is important that the institution of voting remains intact and legitimate, so making measures to ensure that it remains so is important. Widespread voter fraud in the US is in fact a baseless claim, however if not for some levels of security, I believe we would see a much higher prevalence of its occurrence. Therefore, the existence of laws that ensure the right people are casting their own ballots seems important to me. That being said, voter security laws that do not take into consideration the practicality for a particular group of voters and prioritize bureaucracy over ease of access have a more notable case against them for being intentionally discriminatory. And while the government is accountable to its citizens for making sure that voting is accessible as possible, individual citizens also carry autonomy, and with that comes the responsibility to ensure they do everything on their end to see to their registration being intact prior to casting their votes.
The ruling in the Shelby vs. Holder case did effectively dismantle a large part of the provisions outlined in the Voting Rights Act, as Gaytan correctly claims. It is true that legislation must be proposed in order to regulate the new clearance that individual states have gained to enforce new voter identification laws, but the fact that there is now a Democrat majority in congress should not be a reason to ignore Republican congressman in favor of passing resolutions for the Shelby vs. Holder decision. It is important for the longevity of democracy that power is not consolidated under one branch or party, so the Democrat lawmakers must remember to not completely bypass their Republican contemporaries when passing legislation. Gaytan at times seems to undertake a partisan stance in this article, stating that the Democrats could pass legislation without Republican approval, and that they should feel free to use this agency if their resolutions come to a standstill with Republicans. If that were to happen, it would go against the ideals of democracy, and everything else that was being argued for in this article would lose legitimacy.
Danae,
This blog explains a troublesome trend that many states have adopted in response to the 2020 US election outcomes. I enjoyed how you cited current policies that offer solutions to this issue, such as the John Lewis voting legislation. As a resident in Georgia, I see firsthand how the Republican Party has curtailed voting rights for minority groups. Polarization makes all sides of a country’s political field deem each other as a threat to their plan for American democracy; therefore, legislation such as Arizona’s HB2639 is proposed to target a specific group of people to maintain their power. Georgia is doing the same with it’s Senate’s recent adoption of SB 202 which, as many political scholars and activists have cited, bars minority groups from voting. It’s scary to see how much support such policies gain in our state government, but your last points inspire hope that not all is lost. The federal government has the ability to check these discriminatory laws, but polarization in the federal branches proves to inhibit the adoption of such checking powers. Andrew does bring up a good point that these policies shouldn’t be constricted to one party because that would inhibit cooperation across the aisle, but I’d argue that in this case “it takes two to tango.” Hopefully, we see more bi-partisanship in response to these blatant discriminatory laws.
Mutual toleration, as you have pointed out, is crucial to the continuation of democracy. The suggestions presented in this article are useful, but may fail to address a deeper underlying problem. That issue is that while many lawmakers may be using these laws to tighten their grip on power, the Republican base genuinely believes that the 2020 election was stolen. According to a Pew Research report published January 2021 more than three-fourths of Republicans believe Trump was the true winner of the election. In their minds the actual threat to democracy is the fact that Joe Biden is the one currently in the White House. From this understanding, it would be reasonable to crack down on election integrity.
A much deeper approach is needed to restore the public’s faith in the strength and fairness of America’s elections and institutions. Democrats absolutely need to be fighting to prevent the disenfranchisement being pushed by Republican lawmakers. At the same time, they need to come up with a way to help restore faith institutions and understand why so many voters are ready to believe in these conspiracy theories.