Yuval Levin Wants the GOP to stop making it harder to vote

You would think that most people would agree that we should try to make voting secure and accessible, that we should have confidence in the results and that we should make it possible for as many people as possible to cast a ballot.

But Republicans increasingly are seeking to make it harder to vote. There has been a rush in state legislatures to crack down on mail-in voting, to restrict early voting, to make it harder to register to vote, and to make it easier for state officials to remove people from the voting rolls.

The GOP is basing much of this on the fiction that the 2020 election was rigged or that there was wide-scale cheating. That, of course, was the lie that former President Trump told over and over last year before and after the election, which ultimately led to the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Last year all of Trump's lies created a backlash among Republican experts on voting and elections, who were compelled to set the record straight.

"The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud. At most, there are isolated incidents — by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged,” wrote Benjamin Ginsberg, who for more than 20 years was one of the GOP’s fiercest election attorneys and led attempts to root out cheating.

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He's the editor of National Affairs magazine. He is widely respected in serious Republican circles and talks regularly to a lot of members of Congress. And he tells me in this conversation about how he's mobilizing the division of AEI that he oversees to push the GOP to stop making it harder to vote.

"Republicans are at risk, and more than risk, of confirming the Democratic caricature that Republicans just don't want people to vote because they're afraid they would lose. That's what it sounds like. And, increasingly, that's what it is. And that's dangerous, and wrong," Yuval said. But he also said he thinks "Democrats are at risk of confirming the caricature that they think about election reform in a cynical partisan way, as a means of enabling themselves to win more elections."Yuval is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He's the editor of National Affairs magazine. He is widely respected in serious Republican circles and talks regularly to a lot of members of Congress. And he tells me in this conversatino about how he's mobilizing the divisino of AEI that he oversees to push the GOP to stop making it harder to vote.

"Republicans are at risk, and more than risk, of confirming the Democratic caricature that Republicans just don't want people to vote because they're afraid they would lose. That's what it sounds like. And, increasingly, that's what it is. And that's dangerous, and wrong," Yuval said. But he also said he thinks "Democrats are at risk of confirming the caricature that they think about election reform in a cynical partisan way, as a means of enabling themselves to win more elections."

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