Thread by @donmoyn

New from me: early signs from Texas suggest that its new voting laws will be disastrous for vote-by-mail, leading to a significant increase in spoiled ballots. Some counties are rejecting 25-40% of ballots.

What are the broader lessons? 🧵donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-to-think…

A savvy take about new voting laws is that the actually won't change much, based on analyses of previous election laws. See, e.g. this piece from Nate Cohn (which cited my work!)

But I think that view may be the wrong way to think about such laws. 2/ nytimes.com/2021/04/03/ups…

Just normatively, we should not condition access to the right to vote on anticipated partisan effects on turnout. But empirically, I am not sure we know as much as we think we do about how the new laws will work for a few reasons. 3/ donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-to-think…

Changes in Texas laws are a good example. They do not remove vote-by-mail. They simply make it much more onerous and create the potential for significant error. I don’t think prior studies of voting will capture the likely effects that election officials are seeing. 4/

What we do know from studying behavioral science and administrative burden is that imposing novel and non-intuitive requirements – like providing an ID number in vote-by-mail ballots – will trip up lots of people. Which it has. 5/ washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/…

Thus, I don’t know that we have a good handle on the empirical effects of some of the voting changes. Moreover, I don’t think that turnout is the right criteria. We should be looking at when the state imposes unnecessary costs on voters, and which voters they are targeting. 6/

P.S. We are not obliged to take seriously the claims that "we need to improve voter confidence" from people who tanked voter confidence by calling the 2020 election a fraud, and who are now trying to make voting more difficult and confusing. 7/ donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-to-think…