DAVID LEONHARDT: Counterattack on voting rights

In the suburbs of Salt Lake City, there is a planned community called Suncrest that has turned out to be a good place to study voter turnout. Suncrest feels like one community, full of modern, single-family houses. But it straddles two counties — Salt Lake and Utah. And in 2016, the two used different voting systems.

Salt Lake County switched to mail-based voting, which meant that all registered voters would receive a ballot at their home a few weeks before Election Day. They could then mail it back or drop it off at a county office. In Utah County, by contrast, residents still voted the old-fashioned way. They had to visit their local polling place, Ridgeline Elementary School, on Election Day.

It was a natural experiment — with impressive results. Turnout in the Salt Lake County portion of Suncrest rose much more than in the Utah County portion. The convenience of voting by mail led more people to do so.

This is a funny time for voting rights. On the one hand, some Republicans are engaged in a shameful effort to restrict voting access. They are telling lies about voter fraud — which remains extremely rare — and pushing for laws to suppress turnout by Democratic-leaning groups, especially African-Americans. It’s nothing less than an attack on democracy, made possible by several recent Supreme Court rulings.

Yet this attack has also helped feed counterattack. The counterattack is being led more by Democrats than Republicans. But as Utah — among the reddest states of all — shows, there are also a good number of Republicans who believe in expanding voting rights.

The research on the turnout effects is still in the early stages. So far, though, no other reform can claim as much encouraging evidence as mail-based voting.

If your state or county still isn’t willing to switch, however, there are other ways to expand voting rights. Thanks partly to a push by the Brennan Center for Justice, 12 states have recently adopted automatic voter registration, and more are considering it. Automatic registration, which is the norm in much of the world, lets citizens become eligible to vote when they renew a driver’s license or otherwise interact with the government.

Expanding voting rights usually isn’t easy. It requires a dedicated political effort and consistent pushback against falsehoods and scare tactics. But when the effort works, it often proves enduring — because most Americans believe in the idea of universal, convenient voting.

Sure enough, the county relented, and Utah County has joined the vote-by-mail revolution for this week’s primaries in Utah.