'It's not good for our democracy': Republican efforts to restrict voting don't sit well with some conservatives

Yuval Levin, the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, joins Yahoo News Senior Political Correspondent Jon Ward to discuss the rising unease among some conservatives about the increasing aggressiveness of Republicans in state legislatures to tighten election laws and erect obstacles to voting. Levin tells Yahoo News, "Republicans are in a bad place, because I think they find themselves arguing, in essence, that there ought to be fewer voters, which is, in my view, wrong, and also the wrong place to be, as a political matter."

Video transcript

YUVAL LEVIN: I would say, broadly speaking, Republicans are very resistant to election reforms, and have been for a very long time, not just in the wake of this election, because they-- they instinctively see arguments for election reforms as arguments for-- for making more Democrats. They think Democrats are interested in this because they want more Democratic voters. And you know, there is a kind of defensive, and I frankly think unfounded, notion that's implicit in a lot of Republican conversations about this that more voters means fewer elections won by Republicans.

That lower turnout is good for Republicans. I think Republicans and Democrats both believe this. And I think it's just not true. And you know, the evidence for it in recent times, in this century, is not there.

High turnout elections very often go well for Republicans now. Even the 2020 election, which Republicans feel like they didn't win, because they lost the presidency above all, but they also lost the Senate and the House, that's an election where it turned out there were 10 million more Republican voters than Republicans thought there were. Letting more people vote brings out more Republicans and Democrats.

But I would say the prevailing attitude thinking about it requires us to make a distinction between two kinds of election reform, that sometimes get blended together. One is what I would describe as election system reform, like rank choice voting, multi-member districts, that kind of thing. Changing the way our elections are designed.

And the other is election administration reform. The way our elections are run. The rules for-- for who can vote, and when the election is. What forms of voting are allowed, and you know, what the rules are, who's eligible.

These are very different things. And they're contentious for different reasons. I would say, right now, election administration reform is the more contentious. And there, the Republicans are in a bad place because I think they find themselves arguing, in essence, that there ought to be fewer voters, which is in my view, wrong and also the wrong place to be as a political matter.

I think they end up there because they-- I put this way, the core questions in election administration are should more or fewer people be voting, and should there be more or fewer safeguards against fraud and ineligible voters? Those questions are connected, but they're not the same. And we're at a place now where both Republicans and Democrats, but for different reasons, have come to think that our election administration has become illegitimate.

Democrats think the system's illegitimate because it lets too few eligible voters vote, and Republicans think it's illegitimate because it lets too many ineligible voters vote. And you know, in one sense, the obvious answer to that is we should let more eligible voters vote and fewer ineligible voters. But obviously, ways of doing each can come to be kind of mixed up with the other.

But what stands out more to me above all in this is that the-- the lack of trust in the system that results from these two sets of views is actually the biggest problem in American election administration now. The biggest challenge our democracy faces is that lack of trust, because actually, lots of eligible voters can vote. We have very high turnout elections now and there's very little fraud in these elections.

Our elections are very secure. It may well be that we have now the most accessible elections and the most secure elections that we've ever had in the history of the United States, and yet both parties behave as though our system is illegitimate. To me, that's the problem, which means that reform has to build public trust in the system.

We have to think about how we can put to rest the concerns of both the Left and the Right in a way that not only makes the system better. The system's pretty good, not perfect but good, but in a way that builds public trust. That to me is key. And a lot of our work in turning to these issues at the American Enterprise Institute is trying to get the right to the table on these debates. So that Republicans are part of this and don't feel like this is just a Democratic conversation about how Democrats can win elections.