As many Senate Democrats desperately look for ways to protect voting rights and voting access, their Republican counterparts are watching the developments with a degree of faux confusion.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested last week, for example, that the voting restrictions imposed in many states last year don’t really exist. Yesterday, Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas pushed a different line, arguing that if voters don’t see a problem with the status quo, then new legislation is obviously unnecessary.
Pointing to this national poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, Cornyn wrote on Twitter:
“More than nine-in-ten voters (94%) say that voting in the election this November was either very easy (77%) or somewhat easy (17%), while just 6% say that voting was very or somewhat difficult.”
Hours later, the GOP senator again referenced the same survey and added:
“Democrats claim there’s a nationwide assault on the right to vote, but 94% of voters said voting was easy in 2020. This is a manufactured crisis designed to achieve political gain.”
The problem is not with the data. The Pew Research Center really did find that 94 percent of American voters described voting as easy.
Rather, the problem is with the date: The Pew poll was conducted in November 2020. In the months that followed, Republican policymakers, fueled by Donald Trump’s Big Lie, approved 33 laws in 19 states that make it harder for Americans to participate in their own democracy. And as dramatic as these efforts were in 2021, there’s ample evidence the GOP’s anti-voting crusade will continue in 2022.








