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I look at this map and don't see a big problem with those voter suppression laws. It's mostly red states that would hardly be flipped by the Democrats anyway (besides, it's midterms so the sitting party will likely lose seats). Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina didn't enact any new laws. Florida is the exception, but even though it's purplish, at the end of the day they vote Republican. Am I overlooking something? I'm not a Republican party supporter, but it seems to me, so far, that the Democrats just kind of seek a peg on which to hang their incipient defeat ("It's not because people didn't want to vote for us, they just couldn't!"). I realize that there are blue districts even in Alabama (or rather, one district), but are those laws likely to affect the bigger picture?

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  • "red states that would hardly be flipped by the Democrats anyway". Even red states usually have some Democrat representatives.
    – DJClayworth
    Nov 5, 2022 at 14:54
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    The principle of having fair voting isn't enough?
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Nov 5, 2022 at 15:40
  • Have you considered these areas might consistently vote Republican because of existing restrictive voting laws?
    – user253751
    Nov 7, 2022 at 19:29
  • you know that folks put a lot of time and money into laws and elections right? If you know that, and you know people don't want to waste either, it stands to reason that they wouldn't bother with such measures if they didn't produce favorable outcomes.
    – dandavis
    Nov 7, 2022 at 20:38

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It may be true that voter suppression laws will not have a large effect on the 2022 midterms, although even red states elect some Democrat representitives, and even one or two fewer might change the majority in the House.

However there are two reasons why this issue is important.

First, the voter suppression laws won't go away after the midterms. They will still be there for the 2024 Presidential election, and we certainly don't know which states will be in play at that time. Several states that were thought to be "red" ended up voting for Joe Biden in 2020.

But most importantly voter suppression is a massive violation of democratic principles. Voters are expected to be able to vote, and making it difficult is contrary to the idea of democracy. Making it deliberately more difficult is worse - and it is deliberate. Every country I have voted in outside the US has involved a wait of a couple of minutes at most, and another couple of minutes to actually place my vote, and incidents of voter fraud are trivially rare. US voting can take hours. The US could certainly fix this if they wanted to, but they don't.

The US loves to proclaim itself to be "the home of democracy" but in actual fact it ranks a long way down the list of most democratic countries.

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    Just for completeness, in some places, voting is just as quick as minutes (or done at home).
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Nov 5, 2022 at 15:39
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    Yes. But there are others where it takes hours. And the fact that different demographics get different wait times makes it even worse.
    – DJClayworth
    Nov 5, 2022 at 21:10

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