As the 2024 presidential election approaches, politicians are questioning whether certain voting reforms may have impacted the 2020 presidential election. After their 2020 defeat, Republicans have made efforts to reverse an executive order issued by the Biden administration, which aimed to strengthen election accessibility. In a counter move, Democrats have reintroduced their own proposed legislation to uphold the initiatives put forth by President Biden.

Straight Arrow News contributor John Fortier argues that voting reforms actually have very little partisan influence on voter turnout. Fortier reminds us that our perception of political polarization is actually larger than the problem of polarization itself.

How you stand on the voting process has become one of the most contentious issues of the day. Claims are made that specific voting reforms will throw the election to one party or the other. Voter ID laws and felon disenfranchisement will ensure that Republicans win, or generous absentee voting rules will bring in hordes of Democratic voters, tipping the election in their favor.

The truth is that the partisan effects of most voting reforms are at best miniscule. And while our attitudes towards election administration, and even voter confidence in elections, are more polarized than in the past, the extent of that polarization is overstated.

All of the most talked about voting reforms are unlikely to significantly shift elections in a Republican or Democratic direction. A new paper by Justin Grimmer and Eitan Hersh looks at this very issue. It turns out that most reforms don’t have dramatic turnout effects. And even if reforms affect one party more than the other, the tilt is often not dramatic. Combine these two phenomena, and you end up with very small partisan shifts for all of the most commonly discussed voting reforms.