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Who Really Benefits from Voter Suppression?
Paul Weyrich is the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). In 1980, he stood at a microphone in front of fifteen thousand evangelical preachers and said the quiet part out loud: “I don’t want everybody to vote… our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
He wasn’t confessing to a crime nor was he lamenting some long-held guilt from his past. He was acknowledging a concept that would define Republican political strategy for decades to come. Forty-five years later, that strategy is more organized, better funded, and more technologically precise than Weyrich could have imagined when he first articulated it. Understanding who benefits from voter suppression, and why, is the first step toward dismantling it.
So, who really benefits from voter suppression? The Republican Party and their biggest donors.
Why Does Voter Suppression Work as a Political Strategy?
All campaigns and political organizations face a fundamental fork in the road when they plan their strategy. Either persuade more people to support your candidate or cause, or make it harder for the people who oppose you to vote. In a healthy democracy, every campaign would choose the former, but persuasion is difficult and expensive. It requires a compelling message and a voter base that’s at least somewhat open to changing their mind.
Suppression is much cheaper, and in today’s political climate, much easier. Making voting structurally difficult or psychologically exhausting for specific communities can systematically break down your opponent’s coalition and erode their support over time. For campaigns operating in low-margin environments with a reliable base and an opposition they can’t easily convert, the cost-benefit math tips toward suppression.
That’s telling from a policy standpoint. When a political coalition decides that reducing participation is more viable than expanding its appeal, it’s acknowledging that the majority isn’t on its side. Voter suppression is a testament to unpopularity.
Who Drafts Voter Suppression Laws?
Voter suppression at scale requires an organized pipeline of model legislation, legal cover, dark money funding, and coordinated rollout across state lines. That pipeline, in modern American politics, runs primarily through ALEC and the Heritage Foundation.
ALEC operates by convening corporate lobbyists and Republican state legislators in closed-door sessions where model legislation is drafted and voted on, with corporate representatives casting votes alongside elected officials. Legislators return home with bills ready to introduce and their fingerprints on the policy. When voter ID laws appeared in twenty states in a single legislative session, they were ALEC’s model Voter ID Act, introduced by ALEC members across the country simultaneously.
The Heritage Foundation provides the intellectual scaffolding, including the policy papers, the litigation strategies, and the “election integrity” talking points that make suppression sound like reform. Heritage Action, the Foundation’s political arm, has openly claimed credit for drafting provisions of Georgia’s 2021 voting law and Arizona’s voter registration restrictions.
Between 2021 and 2024, states passed 79 restrictive voting laws (nearly three times the number from 2017-2020). The Brennan Center for Justice found that 2024 saw more restrictive voting laws enacted than any year in the past decade except 2021, with at least 30 states enacting 78 of those laws in the four years following the 2020 presidential election. More than 100 Republican politicians with ALEC ties in just six battleground states were lead sponsors or co-sponsors of these bills.
Who Do Republicans Target for Voter Suppression?
The Republican Party’s largest and most reliable voter group, white voters without a four-year college degree, has been shrinking as a share of the electorate for decades. According to Pew Research Center, white voters made up 85% of the overall electorate in 1996; by 2019, that number had dropped to 69%. Within the Republican coalition specifically, white voters constituted 93% of GOP voters in 1996 but only 79% by 2023.
The youngest cohorts of eligible voters are the most racially and ethnically diverse in American history, and they lean Democratic by wide margins (especially in recent polling). The Republican Party faces a structural choice between broadening its appeal to voters it currently doesn’t win, or working to ensure that those voters find it harder to participate. After spending the last decade alienating anyone outside their base with human rights abuses, intensely divisive rhetoric, hard-right policies, and cartoonish incompetence, the choice was obvious: suppress opposition voters.
This is why suppression efforts like voter ID laws, polling place closures, purges of voter rolls, restrictions on mail voting, and limitations on Sunday voting are favored strategies for Republicans nationwide. These strategies hit the populations that are most likely to prevent them from maintaining their power.
What is the Long-Term Impact of Voter Suppression?
The most durable achievement of sustained voter suppression is its implicit impact on voters. There are entire communities Republicans never have to block because they’ve already stopped voting.
When a community watches its political participation produce no tangible results for multiple generations, civic engagement stops being taught generationally. Parents who stood in four-hour lines only to see their candidate lose (or worse, their candidate won and did nothing for them) don’t take their children to the polls. The primary goal of systematic voter suppression is to ensure that communities that threaten Republican power subscribe to the mentality that voting doesn’t matter for them.
This is the long game Weyrich understood in 1980, and MAGA Republicans are taking advantage of today. A smaller, more homogeneous electorate is easier to predict and control. Broad civic participation is not a feature to protect, but a threat to manage.
There’s a reason this compounds over time. When communities don’t vote, elected officials have less incentive to respond to their interests. That neglect produces worse outcomes (especially in housing, education, healthcare, policing, etc.), which makes daily life harder, makes civic participation harder, produces lower turnout, produces less accountability, and thus perpetuates the cycle. The suppression encourages policy failures, and the policy failures deepen the conditions that make suppression easier.
How Technology Is Used for Voter Suppression
Modern suppression is not categorically different from its historical predecessors. The poll taxes, literacy tests, and registration barriers that defined the Jim Crow era are still present; they’re just more sophisticated than they once were.
Microtargeting tools allow campaigns to identify the specific voters within a given community who are most likely to turn out, most likely to lack a valid ID, or most likely to be susceptible to misinformation about voting procedures. These tools also identify those who may generally be impacted by their suppression strategy of choice, allowing them to deliver tailored disinformation to those voters alone.
In 2016, the Trump campaign’s digital operation ran deterrence ads targeting Black and Spanish-speaking communities in Miami-Dade County. In August 2020, a robocall from a fake civil rights organization called “Project 1599” reached approximately 12,000 Detroit-area cell phones, falsely warning Black voters that registering to vote by mail could expose them to warrant checks, debt collectors, and mandatory vaccination tracking. The operatives responsible, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, eventually pleaded guilty to felony telecommunications fraud and received two years of probation. The calls, by then, had already done their work.
Targeted misinformation reaches thousands of people before a correction can reach any of them, and even if a correction comes, it travels through the official channels that suppressed communities already have reason to distrust.
How Can We Fight Voter Suppression?
Luckily, in our endeavor toward a fairer, more equitable democracy for all, Civitech has found a few strategies that have helped mitigate the benefits Republicans enjoy from suppressing Democratic voters.
Step 1: Reframe how you think about suppression.
Dismantling suppressive operations requires showing up in the off-cycle races that determine who serves as secretary of state, county clerk, local judge, and school board member. Viewing suppression as a top-down operation rather than an isolated incident helps Democrats target seats that will more positively impact the communities most targeted.
These are the people who decide how many polling places your county has, whether your registration gets processed or flagged, and whether your provisional ballot gets counted. Shouldn’t the most vulnerable communities be better represented here?
Step 2: Meet the tools of suppression with better ones.
The same data infrastructure that makes modern suppression precise can be turned toward civic engagement. Voter files, demographic data, and behavioral modeling that campaigns use to identify suppression targets are best used to identify and reach communities with low registration rates, incomplete voter records, or histories of disenfranchisement, and connect them with the resources they need to participate. We know this because it’s what we do every day, and we know it works because we proved it scientifically.
Civitech equips the people doing the work of fighting voter suppression with better data and voter outreach than their opposition has ever been able to access.
The communities that have been systematically excluded from political participation for generations deserve more than outrage cycles and one-time registration drives. They deserve durable infrastructure.
The people who benefit most from suppression are counting on the other side staying reactive. Trump’s second term has shown that we can’t.