New Orleans       Trump continues to call for nationalizing the US election procedures, despite the fact that he has surely been advised that the constitution makes it clear that election rules are generally the province of state governments, not federal action or presidential dictate.

Beating this drum does send a message to his sycophants at the state level to get on the stick and do something.  In 2025, twenty-five states have s the introduction of new voter ID laws.  Thirty had bills related to citizenship verification and 26 are trying to change the rules around absentee voting.”  The SAVE Act that he is now promoting and that has been passed by the House, is likely dead in the US Senate.  We’ve fought all of these efforts at voter suppression in every way possible, because they particularly hurt our constituency.  There’s increasing evidence though that it may hurt the proponents of these restrictive measures more than it hurts us, even if at heart is anti-democratic.

To the degree part of this is driven by bogeymen, the notion that non-citizens are piling into the voting booths to sway the results, there’s just no evidence.  Even in Georgia where these fights have been ground zero for years, as The Economist reports,

An audit by Georgia’s secretary of state from the summer of 2024 found just 20 non-citizens out of 8.2 million on the voter rolls.  Most were registered before Georgia checked for citizenship and had never cast a ballot.

In short, a lot of sound and fury, but no harm, no foul.  Another study, they cite of 1.6 billion voting records from all states found that “strict voter ID rules, neither significantly suppressed votes nor prevented fraud.”

Although this might make the Democrats happy and make me wonder what the Republicans are thinking, it’s still bad news from my bias and the constituency we serve, but the way that the voting coalitions have changed in recent elections has these restrictions helping the Dems and shooting the Republicans in the foot or at the least “a wash” according to some researchers.  Where Republicans used to be the hope of upper-class voters, suburbanites, and more, the table has turned with Democrats ruling among the better educated, suburban women especially, while more blue-collar men have drifted to the Republican side, particularly in Trump time.

The voters meant to be harmed by the restrictions among lower income families and minorities among Black and Hispanic voters, may still be harmed, but Trump has pretty much done everything imaginable to alienate these voters by both embracing racism and pursuing his off the chain immigration and deportation programs.  They may be winning in the polls with a common-sense argument that says people show IDs almost everywhere now, so why not when they vote, but once voters get past their barriers and get in the voting booth, Democrats are way more energized now in many elections and reflected in the polls, that they are likely to sweep aside these hastily constructed, deeply ideological barriers.

So, the tables may have turned to offset the suppression drive, leaving me, and others like me, whining that this is wrong, because it is not democratic and hurts lower income voters, but in our winners take all, losers crawl political world, such a view seems isolated and archaic, despite being a civic tragedy.