By Lee H. Hamilton
There is a fight going on over the heart of our democracy, and I worry democracy is losing. Over the last few months, several states have moved to make it harder for their citizens to vote, and more are on tap. It’s hard to tell yet whether this is just a blip or an actual reversal of the US’s long trend of expanding voting access. Either way, it’s cause for attention.
In general, states with Republican-led legislatures are enacting or advancing laws that make absentee voting harder, impose strict limits on drop boxes (which affects urban areas far more severely than rural areas), and in some cases shift power to partisans and away from elections officials. Over the long course of American history, we’ve tended to move the opposite direction: toward expanding people’s ability to vote.
To be sure, there are still plenty of people who are barred from voting by state laws. Some states don’t let convicted felons vote; many states deny the vote to people with psychiatric disabilities; and though all states allow homeless people to vote, sometimes they have trouble meeting the registration requirements.
These days, the battles tend to revolve less explicitly around who should be able to vote and more around ease of voting. In general, voting rights advocates argue that making voting harder means that people who have historically turned out in smaller percentages will once again be at a disadvantage. Many people—over the course of a long career in politics, I’ve seen this first-hand—are intimidated by the voting process. Without encouragement, they opt not to show up at all. There are politicians who know this and take advantage of it.
By now, my view on this ought to be obvious. The United States is stronger when as many people as possible can vote and the electorate reflects the makeup of the population. This has two beneficial effects: it ensures that our elected representatives reflect who we are; and it helps Americans not only feel a stake in the system but believe that their voices are represented in the corridors of power
It is too early to say how this year’s voting-restriction laws will turn out; many of them will likely end up in court. But even if the urge to limit voting is hardly new, it’s dismaying that, well over two centuries since our founding, it remains so pervasive.
Lee Hamilton is a Senior Advisor for the Indiana University Center on Representative Government; a Distinguished Scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies; and a Professor of Practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.
