Most Republican states have made it harder to vote since 2020 – our research shows how successful they are

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In late September, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt boasted that election officials had removed 453,000 people from the state’s voter rolls since 2021. In a state with only 2.3 million registered voters, about 1 in 6 registered voters appears to be a registered voter. It had been purged.
Some of these people were disenfranchised due to death or felony convictions, but about 200,000 of them were excluded as “inactive voters.” This means that you are likely not able to reply to postcards sent to your address.
Voters can re-register if they are accidentally removed, but this “voter list maintenance” process remains a barrier to democratic participation.
Not surprisingly, Oklahoma has historically had one of the lowest voter turnout states in the United States.
This goes against the national trend. Overall, voter turnout in presidential and midterm elections has increased since 2018 across the United States. Americans now feel more than ever that the stakes are high in the election.
Additionally, some states are making it easier to vote. Minnesota, for example, allows voters to register online or at their polling place on Election Day.
But in states like Oklahoma, voters are discouraged and demoralized by policies and laws designed to make voting difficult and time-consuming. Over the past decade, legislatures in these states have been emboldened by a series of Supreme Court decisions striking down key parts of the Voting Rights Act.
These states are now new fronts in the unfinished fight to secure one of the fundamental elements of democracy: the right to vote. We analyzed national voter turnout and voting accessibility data and found that the states with the most restrictive access are overwhelmingly led by Republican legislatures.
A long history of voter disenfranchisement
Elections in the United States have always been state jurisdiction. And state legislatures have long used this power to discriminate against marginalized groups.
Before the Civil War, most states restricted voting rights to white men. Then, in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting states from restricting the right to vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
But in reality, the situation has not changed in all states. In the South, where Jim Crow laws maintained racial segregation in many aspects of public life, lawmakers found other ways to disenfranchise black voters.
These methods included poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and more. In some Southern states, Democrats held whites-only primaries to bar black voters from participating. They argued that political parties are private organizations and not subject to the 15th Amendment.
When all else failed, whites used violence and intimidation to deter black voters from coming to the polls.
Although the status of women improved state by state in the decades following the Civil War, black women in the South were disenfranchised just like black men. This made white women the primary beneficiaries of the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920. This stipulated that states could not withhold the right to vote “on the basis of sex.”
American democracy began to live up to its name with the ratification of the 24th Amendment in 1964, which prohibited the use of poll taxes, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed literacy tests. It was after that.
How states are erecting additional barriers
But even these breakthroughs did not guarantee easy or universal access to voting for all Americans.
Indeed, in response to then-President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, many states have accelerated efforts to crack down on voting rolls and create hurdles for citizen participation. Republican-majority states like Oklahoma have been especially eager to adopt restrictive policies.
According to the Center for Public Integrity, voting has become less accessible in 26 states since 2020. These barriers include many tactics such as:
Partisan redistricting prevents members of minority parties from voting on Election Day. Such practices can make people feel that voting is pointless by drawing district lines that give one party a clear advantage over another.
What we found in our research
Our calculations show that of the states that have become less accessible to vote since 2020, most are located in the South (43%) or Midwest (31%). The data revealed that the most significant losses in voting access occurred in southern states with large numbers of black voters.
The most restrictive legislation is led by Republican-controlled state legislatures, and 86% of those states pass unfair voting barriers. By contrast, only 5% of Democratic-led states have difficulty voting.
Additionally, our research shows that high barriers to voting are directly related to lower turnout.
Analyzing all states, the average turnout in “high barrier” states in the 2022 election was 45.8%, while the average turnout in “low barrier” states was 49%, statistically There was a significant difference. The average voter turnout for all U.S. states in 2022 was 46.2%.
In the South, voting became more difficult after the 2020 election in most states (11 of 16), and turnout in 2022 was significantly lower than the national average in nearly all states (Mississippi was the most (The lowest rate was 32.5%).
The average turnout in high-barrier southern states with Republican-led legislatures was 40.6%, compared to 46.2% in high-barrier states with Republican-led voters elsewhere in the region.
On the other hand, among states with low hurdles, voter turnout exceeded 60% in three states: Oregon, Maine, and Minnesota. Both states have a Democratic majority in their legislatures; in the case of Minnesota, the legislature and Democratic governor are divided.
States need to motivate voters, not demoralize them.
These policies that restrict access to voting, labeled as “election security,” will no doubt affect turnout in certain states in the upcoming November election.
Research shows that Americans choose to vote because they believe it is their civic duty or because they believe the outcome of the election is important to their community, country, and themselves. .
But the odds of being a key voter in deciding the outcome of an election are estimated to be 1 in 1 million in battleground states and much lower in non-competitive states, meaning people who stay home on election day is also a rational action.
Voter turnout nationwide is already low compared to other democracies, so state legislatures should do everything they can to motivate voters and make it easier, not harder, to vote. .
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