In my opinion, this issue is not going to go away any time soon. And here’s my opinion as to why: On the one hand, we have many Democrats and several progressive organizations taking new voter registration drives really seriously for the first time in decades. On top of that, we also have a top-office candidate who is suddenly making voting look relevant to many people who were apathetic or negative about voting previously.
The combination of these factors will not only strain the ordinary workings of the electoral system somewhat, but will open up a lot of cracks for inevitable errors, negligence, and wrongdoing. There is no question that some registration organizers and some voters are going to commit some illegal acts when it comes to registering and voting, whether out of ignorance, carelessness, or deliberate malicious intent. I’ve seen no evidence so far that the total amount of such accidental and deliberate vote fraud will be significant in affecting the outcome of any electoral contest, but I am quite convinced that that amount will be nonzero.
On the other hand, we have many Republicans and conservatives absolutely shitting themselves over the prospect of seeing hundreds of thousands of new voters added to the electoral rolls. The Republican Party’s problem, at least as it’s presently constituted itself, is that it’s a minority party with respect to most of the actual views of most Americans eligible to vote. The Republican Party of today is the natural political choice only for economic elites, the religious right, and certain social conservatives.
And these groups (1) don’t add up to a majority of those eligible to vote; (2) are already highly mobilized, ever since the large grassroots organizing efforts that the conservative movement launched starting in the 1980’s; and (3) are not entirely comfortable with one another, so the GOP has to perform a rather tenuous balancing act to try to keep them all happy enough to keep turning out for GOP candidates. The Pubs don’t have new wells of potential voters to tap to the same extent that the Dems do. Their current policies simply aren’t in sync with the interests or preferences of most potential voters.
Simply put, this means that the more new voters turn out, on average, the worse the Republicans are going to lose, on the national level. The governing majorities that they’ve built in recent decades have depended (not entirely, but to a significant extent) on the fact that only about half of Americans eligible to vote actually turn out for national elections (as compared to three-quarters or more in most other industrialized countries). The average American is, on the whole, significantly more liberal on most issues than the current Republican Party position is, which means that if the average American actually gets around to voting, s/he is likely to vote Dem.
This puts Republicans in a bind. Most of them, being honorable people, are simply going to take the hit and work to rebuild themselves as a viable majority party. Some of them, however, are going to draw the conclusion that if more voters = fewer Republican victories, the best strategy is to keep from getting more voters.
So we’re going to see not only increasing Republican vigilance about the possibility of Dem and liberal vote fraud (which in itself, mind you, is a good thing—as I said in my first post to this thread, I think it’s most natural and most efficient when partisans of opposing stripes keep on vigilantly searching each other’s eyes for motes), but increasing shrillness and exaggeration about the extent to which vote fraud is a serious problem. We’re also, alas, likely to see increasing efforts by unscrupulous conservatives to simply game the system by squelching legitimate votes, in any way that they can. So the current rather ugly situation is about to get uglier. Well, that’s democracy.