Richard Hasen

If you're going to try to mess with an election, it's much easier to mess with it on the back end when votes are being tabulated than on the front end when people are voting.

Although I think talking about the potential for troops to be in the streets during election season, that itself is a way of demobilizing the electorate.

I mean, think about this.

There are many people who are on the cusp.

More people vote in presidential elections than congressional elections.

Presidential elections get the most public attention.

People are deciding, should I stay home?

Should I vote?

If they think that they might be hassled or there might be problems at the polling place, they might just stay away.

And it might not just be Democrats who stay away.

It might be those Trump voters.

You know, Trump appealed to a lot of these infrequent voters, voters who don't have a long history of voting.

This may be in some ways very self-defeating, all of this talk about interfering with the elections.

It's going to cause some people to not show up at the polling place.

I think that both Republicans and to some extent Democrats are stuck in a mindset that is probably outdated, which is that if you make voting and registration harder, it is going to help the Republican Party.

20 years ago, we'd say that the Republican Party was made up of whiter, older, more affluent voters.

These are people who tend to live in the same place, who tend to be longtime registrants in the same place in order to vote.

And young people, people of color, people who move a lot, poor people, more likely to be Democrats.

And therefore, they're the ones who are most likely to be caught up in new changes in voter registration and voting.

But times have changed, and the coalitions of the parties have changed.