Good Monday evening and happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This is Daniel Allott with The Hill’s Top Opinions.
New voting rules have turned Election Day into Election Month and made voting easier than ever before. The new laws are seen as working to the advantage of the Democratic Party. But instead of complaining about the new rules and trying to overturn them, writes Harvard University professor of government Paul E. Peterson, “Republicans must learn to accept the early-voting reality and exploit the new rules as best they can.”
The new voting rules – including simplified voter registration, early and mail-in voting and ballot harvesting – have caused voting to spike in recent elections, writes Peterson, "to a high of 67 percent in 2020, a 7 percent jump since 2016 and the highest rate the United States has seen since the 19th century.”
“Many Republicans fear that the new laws will undermine election integrity,” Peterson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, writes. “But it is not easy to undo reforms made in the name of democracy and citizen participation.”
“The solution for Republican leaders,” he continues, “is not to whine about election stealing or struggle to reverse the rules but to urge their fellow partisans to vote as early as possible and to organize groups that harvest ballots at religious gatherings, sports events, grocery stores, main streets and shopping malls.”
Put simply: “Republicans need to embrace immediately the permissive election environment they cannot avoid.”
Read Peterson’s op-ed here.
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