Jon Ward in Yahoo News:

Democrats told Americans over the last year that voter suppression was the biggest threat to democracy, even as it was clear that the far more immediate challenge is the potential for politicians to overturn election results after votes have been counted.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress are now working to pass key reforms that will make election subversion harder. But many people involved in efforts to preserve democracy have grown alarmed over the past year as they watched Democrats tell their supporters that America’s future was at stake if they did not pass two doomed voting rights bills.

We wasted a year,” said one person who runs an organization helping local election officials across the country. “A lot of us who work in the space every day are baffled by the way these tactics were devised and pursued.”

Now Democratic activists and grassroots supporters are deflated by the failure to pass voting legislation, even as crucial work is ongoing to prepare for and prevent a potential assault on democracy. They fear it will be difficult to rouse voters with a message that, actually, this other thing is the real existential threat.

“All the rhetoric about how important it was to pass those bills so people could vote, and then failing, stands to depress [Democratic] turnout,” said Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election lawyer who in 2020 became a leading voice pushing back on then-President Donald Trump’s election lies. Ginsberg is now leading an effort with Democratic attorney Bob Bauer to help protect local officials who oversee elections from threats and frivolous legal harassment.

Few Democrats are willing to speak publicly or on the record about their party’s shortcomings over the past year, because they do not want to give ammunition to their Republican opponents and because the threats to voting rights are quite real….

Meanwhile, tensions between nonpartisan experts and Democrats rose to the surface recently when one of the nation’s leading authorities on voting, Rick Hasen, wrote an article criticizing Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic election lawyer, for bashing efforts to reform the ECA.

“Marc could play a much more constructive role here … even if it does not give Marc everything he thinks Democrats want,” wrote Hasen, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine.

Elias had been saying that ECA reform was “a GOP trap” in early January, when Democrats were in the midst of a desperate push to pressure a few Senate Democrats to support two voting rights bills. Elias said Republicans wanted to offer up support for ECA reform as a way to kill those bills.

Hasen, in late January, said Elias was acting like an “online bully” and asserted that ECA reform was “an opportunity that should not be passed up.”…

n March of last year, Freedom House, a think tank funded by the U.S. government to study trends in governing around the world, released a report noting that democracy was under siege not just in the U.S. but seemingly everywhere.

Sarah Repucci, the report’s author, told Yahoo News that while there were good elements to the voting rights bills being pushed in Congress by Democrats, there was a danger to making it a partisan effort with no support from the GOP.

“Politicizing democracy itself is one of the most damaging things we can do,” she said.

Hasen made this point as well. “I think there is a great danger when the fight over voting rights is seen solely as a fight of the Democratic Party against the Republican Party. This should not become, or be seen, as a partisan issue,” Hasen said last spring.