Democrats and Republicans today find each other on opposing sides of many electoral reform issues. Democrats love mail ballot elections, ballot harvesting, and long deadlines for returned ballots; Republicans are generally hostile. Republicans support stricter voter identification requirements, restrictions on private funding of election administration, and (as in a recent Arizona law) requirements that potential voters prove U.S. citizenship before registering to vote; Democrats usually recoil at such devices. What explains the seemingly dichotomous views?
The first thing that should be noted is that initial appearances are somewhat deceiving. The parties do indeed exhibit these tendencies, but they are only tendencies, not hard and fast rules. Utah, one of the most Republican states in the Union, uses mail ballot elections, while Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware has long had relatively strict election rules. Some of the controversial bills adopted by Republican legislatures in the last year actually contained elements of both approaches; Georgia, for example, toughened rules surrounding mail ballots but expanded in-person early voting.
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