The US needs stronger voting rights

So divided is the US that even the act of voting is itself politicised. Democrats worry about curbs on the free exercise of it in Georgia and other states. Some Republicans are so sure of voter fraud as to doubt the soundness of Donald Trump’s presidential election loss to Joe Biden.

The conservative mistrust is neither new nor invented by Trump. It has been around at least since the jokes about Illinois cows voting for John F Kennedy in 1960. But the age and depth of a grievance does not validate it. Of the threats to US democracy, the reality of reduced access to the vote outweighs the theory of mass abuse of it. (The courts, remember, dismissed the various appeals against November’s results.)

If passed, the For The People Act, which cleared the House of Representatives last month, would go some way to fixing the problem. The act seeks to tighten federal standards in what is for now a fragmented “system” of electoral rules. Each state would have to provide two weeks of early voting, for example. Mail ballots and same-day registration would become normal. Felons who have served their sentences stand to have their voting rights restored.

Even without its wider reforms — to campaign finance, to gerrymandering — it is bold legislation. This helps to explain the dearth of Republican support. Among conservatives, easier voting has become increasingly synonymous with Democratic advantage. The problem here is not just the solipsism (is there no Republican fraud?) or the partisan way of looking at a core civic right. It is the weird defeatism. Even if it were a valid argument against reform, the idea that a democratic US means an ever more liberal one is false. It rests on a demographic determinism: specifically, the premise that ethnic diversity leads to liberalism. Trump’s gains among Latino voters in November suggest a more complex picture.

In any case, it is not a valid argument. A country that denied voting rights to some of its citizens well within living memory should be all the more vigilant to new restrictions. On this score, business appears more enlightened than the party it often funds. Last weekend more than a hundred corporate leaders reportedly met on Zoom to discuss the infringement of voting rights in various states. Proposed responses included holding back not only donations from politicians who support such laws, but investments from states that pass them. This follows a recent open letter from black executives against the trend to harsher electoral rules.

It should be said that not all companies are vocal. And sceptics are right to say that business will serve its commercial interest in the end. But the definition of that interest seems to be more expansive than it once was. To be seen as complicit in the effective narrowing of the franchise might repel a generation of consumers and potential hires.

These are likely just the early days of a more politically assertive corporate sector, one that strays beyond matters of tax and regulation to express a civic view. This outspokenness is not without risks. It might feed the very modern idea that business is only good if it does extraneous deeds: the work of job-creating and product-inventing should never be glossed over.

But if a corporate world that was mostly quiet during the outrages of the Trump era has found its voice, the US will be better for it. Senate Republicans are likely to deny voting reform the necessary supermajority, at least in its present form. If they are on the wrong side of a good cause, they cannot count on all their natural supporters to be there with them.