Miles Park for NPR:
When John Merrill was secretary of state of Alabama, he felt like it was his job as the state’s top voting official to encourage voter registration.
“One of the things I was known for as a secretary was trying to get everybody in the state that was eligible,” said Merrill, a Republican.
But he remembered that for many in his party, that stance was controversial.
“I had people when I would speak to some Republican groups, they’d tell me, ‘I don’t like that, I don’t think it’s a good thing,'” Merrill said. “And I’m like, ‘Why would you say that?’ And they’re like, ‘Because you’re going to get more Blacks and you’re going to get more Democrats.'”
It’s not usually said out loud that explicitly. But for decades, the GOP has generally sought limits on voting access. Just this year, Republicans sued numerous times to try to rein in mail voting, and sued the Biden administration over an executive order meant to encourage voter registration.
Such moves — along with restrictive voting legislation — have usually been done in the name of enhancing election security. But politics plays a role, too.
For years, conventional political wisdom has held that higher-turnout elections — as well as policies aimed at increasing voter access — would favor Democrats, and lower-turnout elections — and more restrictive policies — would favor Republicans.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump even expressed concern that higher levels of voting would mean “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
But this year’s election results are a major blow to that theory. Republicans won a trifecta at the federal level in a high-turnout environment.
And now the question is, how will the party respond?
“High turnout doesn’t hurt Republicans, and it can in fact help them,” said Guy-Uriel Charles, an election law expert at Harvard University. “Now we will see whether the lesson that they learn here is, OK, let’s not fight access … or we will see whether we return back to regularly scheduled programming.”…