“The Progressive Roots of Republican Vote Suppression”

Jonathan Bernstein for Bloomberg View:

Is Hasen correct? It’s hard to know. Another plausible explanation is that the Republican efforts are devoted to restricting the franchise for purely partisan reasons, while conservative writers flail around looking for a more high-minded motivation. The mostly-Anglo Republican Party has a purely partisan self-interest in making voting more difficult for Democrats, which will have the effect of depressing voting among blacks and other historically disenfranchised groups who happen to be heavily Democratic. So it’s not surprising (and in some ways not a bad thing) that conservatives might want to find a more compelling public reason for what they’re doing.

On the other hand, it’s also possible that conservatives first sought out acceptable-sounding reasons for an essentially partisan gambit, then came to believe their own sound bites. That’s hardly unusual for any group of politicians. And don’t forget that Republicans are not unanimous in attempting to make voting harder; some very conservative or libertarian Republicans have joined Democrats in pushing to restore voting rights for ex-felons.

It’s worth noting that the elitist version of democracy that Hasen describes has a long, rich, history in the U.S. It’s quite similar to the justifications Progressive-era thinkers used for their own restrictions of the franchise, and more broadly for the kind of elections they favored. Progressive-era reforms generally made voting much harder for individual citizens. Non-partisan elections removed the ready prompt of party; ballot measures asked voters to carefully consider arguments for and against something, rather than just vote with one’s party. The idea was that the best voters would take the time to individually consider each election choice separately, based on “the issues,” while those who just voted with their ethnic bloc or local ward were bad voters. Democracy, Progressives concluded, would work better if such voters were discouraged from participating. Meanwhile, voter registration would add an extra hoop for voters to jump through (which would not deter the “best” voters).

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