Which Ideology Tends To View Change Suspiciously?

Voters expect in line to bandage their ballots in the state'southward primary election on Tuesday in Atlanta. Ron Harris/AP hide caption

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Ron Harris/AP

Voters expect in line to cast their ballots in the state'due south main election on Tuesday in Atlanta.

Ron Harris/AP

Republicans and Democrats seldom agree on much in 21st century politics — simply one result that divides them more than ever may be voting and elections.

The parties didn't only boxing about whether or how to enact new legislation following the Russian interference in the 2016 ballot. They likewise differ in the bones ways they perceive and frame myriad aspects of practicing democracy.

Republicans' and Democrats' vastly different starting points help explain why the politics over voting and elections take been and likely will remain so fraught, through and beyond Ballot 24-hour interval this year.

Sometimes information technology seems as if the politicians involved barely live in the aforementioned state. It has become common for one side to discount the legitimacy of a victory past the other.

And the coronavirus pandemic, which has scrambled nearly everything about life in the United States, makes agreement it all even more complicated. Hither'south what you demand to know to decode this year's voting controversies.

The Rosetta rock

The cardinal that unlocks and then much of the partisan debate about voting is ane word: turnout.

An old truism holds that, all other things held equal, a smaller pool of voters tends to be amend for Republicans and the larger the pool gets, the better for Democrats.

This isn't mathematically ironclad, as politicians acquire and relearn regularly. Only this assumption is the foundation upon which much else is built.

Traditionally, Republicans accept tended to support higher barriers to voting and frequently focus on voter identification and security to protect confronting fraud. All the same, almost half of GOP voters back expanding vote by mail in calorie-free of the pandemic.

Democrats tend to support lowering barriers and focus on making access for voters easier, with a view to encouraging engagement. They support expanding votes via mail too.

The next fight, in many cases, is well-nigh who and how many get what admission via mail.

All this besides creates a dynamic in which many political practitioners can't envision a neutral compromise, considering no thing what philosophy a land adopts, it's perceived as zero-sum.

Or equally former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, told NPR, there are no "off-white" maps in the word near how to draw voting districts — considering what Democrats call "off-white" maps are those, he believes, that favor them.

No, say voting rights groups and many Democrats — the only "fair" style to carry an ballot is to admit as many voters every bit possible. Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who has charged authorities in her home country with suppressing turnout, named her public interest group Off-white Fight Action.

Access vs. security

The pandemic has added some other layer of complexity with the new accent information technology has put on voting by mail. President Trump says he opposes expanding voting by mail, and his allies, including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, telephone call the process rife with opportunities for fraud.

Even and so, Trump and McEnany both voted by postal service this year in Florida, and Republican officials across the country have encouraged voting by mail.

Democrats, who have made election security and voting access a large office of their political make for several years, debate that the pandemic might discourage people from going to old-fashioned polling sites.

If at that place'southward rough agreement about that away from the White House, there are many disputes about the specifics — what practices will be permitted based on what the parties perceive every bit beneficial for them.

A study by Stanford Academy found that voting past post yielded a pocket-sized but roughly equal increase in turnout betwixt the parties.

It isn't articulate yet how much voting by mail might aggrandize by Ballot Day, but it's the subject field of lawsuits across the country; apart from the politics, absentee ballot-press is a boutique business organization and its chapters will be tested — as may that of the Post.

How common is voter fraud?

It exists, but it's very rare.

Despite anecdotal cases of people voting fraudulently in person or suspicious ballots appearing in the mail, almost of the time, in almost places, the way elections in the U.S. are processed is legitimate.

Since the pandemic, some Republican officials at the state level accept acknowledged that the party's language effectually fraud may now be putting voting at risk by amplifying fraud concerns out of proportion.

Read more from NPR'due south Miles Parks well-nigh the integrity of voting past mail.

Trump sometimes says that large numbers of people vote illegally in the United States, but a panel he appointed to investigate that ostensible trouble could non substantiate information technology. Listen to an interview with a member of that commission.

However, anecdotal cases of fraud crop up beyond the state.

Voter suppression

Activists frequently call out what they term suppression.

In a dispute this spring in Nevada, for example, Democrats sued to stop the state from sending mail service-in ballots merely to people who had voted in recent elections rather than to all registered voters.

Democrats said the land's plan would disenfranchise some citizens by leaving them out of the primary; Republicans argued that states' voter rolls are ofttimes inaccurate and that sending out ballots to everyone could lead to the ballots getting lost or winding up in the wrong hands — opening up the prospect for fraud.

Voter rolls are often the focus of disputes for these reasons.

People die, move — and movement out of country — and then government periodically need to delete names. How oftentimes that happens, and for what reasons, can become controversial and the kernel of legal and political warfare betwixt the parties.

Likewise with voter identification documents.

In Texas, for example, the Republican-dominated state legislature deemed that handgun licenses were acceptable identification at the polls — but student IDs, fifty-fifty those issued by the state's ain universities, were not.

For all the discussion about the effect of voter ID laws, however, a study last year found that whatever impact those laws might have is outset by increased system and activism by nonwhite voters — leading to no change in registration or turnout.

Another battleground is early on and absentee voting. Rules vary by state, with some requiring more explanation than others as to what's permissible.

Bitter lessons

The parties today have arrived at this moment subsequently years of what they would argue were bad experiences with elections at the hands of their opponents.

Republicans, among other things, sometimes indicate to what they believe was cheating in the 1960 presidential race. Declared Autonomous chicanery, in this telling, threw the results to John F. Kennedy and price the race for Richard Nixon.

Fraudulent IDs, undocumented immigrants voting, people beingness "bused in" on Election Day remain consistent themes when Republicans talk about elections.

Democrats look to the decades of Jim Crow discrimination that kept many black voters out of elections.

More than recently, they look at the Supreme Courtroom's 2000 decision that handed the outcome of that election to George W. Bush over Al Gore. The court halted the counting of ballots that Democrats argued could have changed Florida'due south results, swinging the state to Gore.

Abrams' group perceives what information technology calls a deliberate entrada by the institution to purge Georgia voter rolls of mainly black or Democratic voters.

Bug with voting in Georgia's main in June underscored those problems and that history, Abrams and other critics said.

Voters in Georgia are facing outrageous voter suppression resulting from years of election organisation sabotage by Republican lawmakers. If Republicans really wanted you to vote, they would support #VoteByMail and hand-marked #PaperBallots. https://t.co/L6WFHKUlne
— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) June nine, 2020

Matters of principle

Many party leaders describe at having arrived at their positions based upon principle. Republicans are more likely to argue that casting a vote is a privilege of citizenship to exist earned and safeguarded with restrictions and security.

They as well point to what they phone call the principles of federalism and the need for people to be engaged at the state and local level with the conduct of elections — not for broad mandates from Washington.

Democrats are more than likely to argue that voting is a correct and that the barriers to casting a ballot should be as depression as practical. President Lyndon Johnson and Democrats in the 1960s used the Voting Rights Act and federal power to dismantle racist state laws designed to prevent African Americans from voting, but those actions were later weakened past the Supreme Courtroom.

Some electric current Democrats, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have chosen for new action by Congress and the federal regime that could involve new funding, legislation and administration from Washington.

Whatever the upshot of this year'southward ballot, these disputes over elections themselves likely will keep well into the future.