As the fight over voting rights continues across the country, new poll results show Americans by a wide margin want the priority to be on making legal voting easier, instead of trying to make voting fraud harder.
The poll by The Washington Post/ABC News was issued Thursday (full results can be found here). It found that 62 percent of adults say it is more important to pass new laws that make it easier for people to vote lawfully, while just 30 percent say it’s more important to pass new laws that make it harder for people to vote fraudulently.
The poll was conducted by telephone June 27-30, just before the Supreme Court issued a ruling many experts saw as a severe blow to voting rights in America. The Court sided with the state of Arizona over two state voting restrictions that a lower court had said discriminated against minority voters. Observers say the high court’s ruling could make it harder to challenge some of the new voting restrictions that have already been passed in Georgia, and are being pursued by GOP-run legislatures in states such as Texas following former president Trump’s lies about election fraud.
Unsurprisingly, the Post-ABC poll finds a sharp divide among partisan and racial lines about where the emphasis should be regarding voting laws. A 59 percent majority of Republicans say it’s more important to pass new laws making it harder to vote fraudulently, while 62 percent of independents and 89 percent of Democrats say new laws should make it easier for people to vote lawfully.
Also, 82 percent of Black adults say it’s more important to make it easier for people to vote in a legal and lawful manner; 67 percent of Hispanic adults and 58 percent of White adults agree.
The poll was taken from a random national sample of 907 adults; the margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points and error margins are larger among subgroups.