Rick Wilson: Threats to Free and Fair Elections Loom Large – But They’re Not What You Think
By Rick Wilson
I’ve been a Republican political consultant, communications expert, and ad-maker for over 30 years. To say I know how the sausage gets made would be an understatement. There is surprisingly little coincidence in politics, which means that the rise in voting restrictions is not an accident. It’s part of a well-funded, coordinated attack on our democracy — one that’s been underway for far longer than anyone has noticed — but it’s not too late to stop it.
Voting, the most fundamental element of the American democratic process, has been weaponized into a partisan tool as part of a full-scale assault on the very foundation of our republic. With every passing election cycle, and particularly since 2020, we have seen the passage of new laws and restrictions that limit the ability of millions of eligible Americans to cast a ballot, all in the name of the “protection of electoral sanctity.” Don’t be deceived – these laws are not the guardians of democracy; they are a tool to destroy it.
Take, for instance, the deceptive allure of voter ID laws. On the surface, requiring identification seems innocuous. It might even seem to some like a common sense checkpoint. But these restrictions were designed to be unambiguously prohibitive for millions of Americans. As political camps continue to debate the security of elections, our priority must be to increase eligible voters’ access to the polls, not to erect more barriers. While voter ID laws disproportionately impact marginalized communities, they have a markedly negative impact on eligible voters across every demographic, on both sides of the aisle, and on our shared democracy.
This spring, Speaker Mike Johnson introduced the latest proposed voting rights restriction in the House of Representatives, the ironically titled ‘SAVE Act’. Speaker Johnson gave away the game at a press conference in May: the right’s concerns around non-citizen voting are based on their so-called “intuition” and not grounded in reality or anything close to it.
Non-citizens voting in federal elections is a phenomenon that factually does not exist and is already illegal. This disenfranchising legislation gives a platform to the same tired conspiracy theories we’ve heard for years. False claims that non-citizens are voting in federal elections are a deliberate ploy to breed fear, stoke hate, and make some voters fearful of showing up on Election Day.
In July, the SAVE Act was passed by the House and sent to the Senate. If enacted as written, this legislation would give states less than two weeks to implement a law requiring voters across the country to provide documentary proof of citizenship– such as a birth certificate, US passport or passport card, or a Naturalization Certificate– before registering or casting a ballot. Call me alarmist, but I don’t see this going smoothly.
New research shows that 21.3 million people – that’s 9.1% of voting-age American citizens – do not have easy access to proof of citizenship documents. Millions of voters do not possess these documents in the first place. They may have been lost or stolen, and the financial, time, and bureaucratic barriers to replacing them are prohibitive.
Bottom line: The SAVE Act would, with almost no prior warning, unnecessarily prevent millions of Americans of all political ideologies and affiliations from accessing the ballot box. And yes, Republicans, too.
Putting the SAVE Act aside, millions of Americans will vote this year for the first time since 2020, but only after navigating myriad new voting restrictions. Eighteen states have passed new or stricter voter ID laws since the last presidential election.
In the many additional states with active litigation in play, constantly shifting voting laws make it incredibly difficult for voters to find accurate information about what documents are needed to vote, sowing doubt and confusion among voters across the board. This past year, nearly three times as many voters called or texted a voter ID helpline run by the nonpartisan organization VoteRiders– a 287% increase from 2021. But this number doesn’t even capture the full scope of the problem. Voters who turned out in local elections last year are highly motivated to vote and more likely to have encountered the latest voting restrictions than voters who sat out those elections.
Voter confusion and intimidation isn’t just a feeling we can talk people out of – it is a crisis with real consequences. Hundreds of thousands of voters in states with ever-changing laws might be discouraged from voting because of these sentiments. As just one example: over half of Americans living in states requiring photo ID to vote in-person do not realize that they will need this type of identification to successfully cast a ballot.
This chaos is not a coincidence. It’s a strategy – psychological warfare aimed at discouraging us from exercising our right to vote. Before the 2020 elections and the Big Lie that ensued, election ‘integrity’ was not a concern in most states. But sensationalized claims of voter fraud – which only occurs at a rate of between 0.0003%-0.0025%– have given rise to a highly partisan “election security” movement that has made significant strides to limit ballot access.
Like so much that faces us, it won’t be politicians who solve this crisis. It will be Americans outside of Washington, D.C.
Many organizations and advocates on the ground are fighting back and have initiated solutions for the powerful and multi-pronged obstacles to voting that exist. We know there are too many barriers to voting in America today, and these barriers are far more prolific than even just four years ago. We know that too many voters don’t know what they need to vote, and that millions don’t actually have what they now need to vote.
It’s on all of us.
Voting rights organizations, election offices, elected officials, and volunteers alike must work together to ensure that every eligible voter can successfully cast a ballot – no matter where they live, what they look like, or who they’re voting for.
So, fellow Americans, my question is this: what side of history do you want to be on? The battleground is set, the stakes are high, and the time to act is now. Welcome to the fight for our democracy.
Rick Wilson is a renowned political strategist and commentator. He is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, Resolute Square, and a board member at VoteRiders, the country’s leading voting rights organization focused on the issue of voter ID.
