What, in other words, if the coronavirus is the icing on the voter suppression cake?

We tend to think of presidential elections as battles fought over character and policy, or, in the Trump era, bombast and insults and drama. It’s a performance and the campaign, however horribly unserious it might be, matters. But 2020 might not be about any of this. It might hinge, to an extent that few fully grasp, on a turnout reduced — suppressed — to a level unseen in recent decades.

The commentator Jonathan Chait is among those Left-wing Americans who have noticed and are sounding the alarm:

“It’s not clear,” he says, “If Democrats have fully grasped the gravity of what Trump and his party are attempting to do. The coronavirus poses a threat to elections in general, but a special threat to urban voters, who tend to face more crowded polling stations …… Republicans have calculated that the public-health threat of the virus will suppress the urban vote for them. All they have to do is block any changes to the election system [intended to offset the effects of the virus on voting habits] and allow nature to run its course.”

Voter suppression down the ages has pretty much been a deniable misdemeanour — “we just want to secure the integrity of the ballot for everyone”. Even in the bad old days down the racist south there was some nonsense mouthed about literacy being necessary in order for voters to understand the ballot.  It was about the sacred ballot – they pretended – not about the suppression. But this president has broken with such delicate dissimulation.

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The strategy is blunter in the age of the Donald. The President even outlined it live on Fox News, following the Democrats’ series of suggestions to Congress about postal voting during this time of plague: “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Whoops.

The game has been given away. He wants, clearly and openly, to stop groups who vote Democratic from voting.

Mr Trump isn’t entirely opposed to postal voting: he likes it for the military and for older Americans. Two groups who – surprise surprise — back him. But for everyone else he insists that people should show up at the polls. Or not.

Even before the Coronavirus hit, the stage was set in many states for November 3^rd — election day — to be a time to washing the car, tend the garden, gaze at the sky; anything other than voting. That’s because across all those states controlled by Republican Governors and legislatures the suppression efforts have come thick and fast in recent years.

Not all the initiatives to ‘reform’ voting law are deemed many Americans to be particularly offensive. To take a sample: in Oklahoma they are removing people who haven’t voted for eight years from the registers, which feels to many in that state like reasonable tidying. In Florida, they’re stopping convicted felons from voting until they’ve paid money they owe to victims of crime, which, if you are a victim of crime in Florida, probably seems fair enough. In other states you need proper ID, provided by a government agency.

But these measures mount up: in Mississippi the Democrats think fully 8% of the adult population is currently banned from the polls for one reason or other. Most of them will be Democratic party supporters: poorer people who go to jail more; black people living hand to mouth lives, without proper ID linked to a firm address; youngsters caught out by some special rule about registration.

And even if some of the rules are defensible, plenty struggle to pass any kind of honest electoral smell-test. Among the stinkiest is an effort going on at the moment in Texas to stop ‘straight ticket’ voting.  In all recent elections in the state, with one pull of the lever, you have been able to  back the Democrats, all of them, or the Republicans, all of them. Remember the ballots are long in many states so it’s convenient that you can, with one pull, elect your party choice of judges, school district bosses, rat catchers.

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But, oh dear, mightn’t this lead to a lack of proper thought among electors about the people on the ballot? Well that’s what backers of the change claim, all innocent-faced, as they press for everyone to spend much longer actually voting for each individual candidate.

And the inevitable effect of banning the ‘straight ticket’? Queues. Queues which are already often long, would get longer still. Folk with pressing things to do, poorer people with two jobs, parents due to cook supper, would go home. And they’re generally Democrats. Texas is the biggest state the Republicans can count on in a presidential election: it’s their California, with 38 electoral votes and 7% of the electoral college in 2016. The Republican on the ticket has won every presidential contest since 1976.  But as Hispanic voting grows there are reasons to think Texas might be in play in 2020.

Not if the queues are long, though. Suppression works.

The story so far is a familiar one. It fits into a tradition that dates back to Jim Crow. Civil rights were granted grudgingly and slowly and plenty of black Americans think the battle for proper democratic freedom is still to be properly won. It’s reach is wider than the presidential race, too: comfortable America is none too keen on low-life America getting real power.

It is part of American life. As is the grisly fact that turnout in American presidential elections is low in any case – around 45% of voters don’t make it to the polling station. Lots of Americans don’t need to be suppressed: they’re just lazy or, more often, busy and tired and disillusioned. And Coronavirus will keep even more from the polls — won’t it?

Well in recent days, rather gloriously, the story has changed and changed in a way that cheers those who are confident in the ability of the USA to rise to challenges. You don’t have to be a Democratic party supporter (though it probably helps) to notice and salute what has just happened in still-chilly Wisconsin.

The Democrats tried to get their primary election – and the other polls due at the same time – postponed because of the Coronavirus. Republicans refused. The result was some measure of chaos.

As The New York Times put it, people were forced to choose between their health and their civic duty:

“In Milwaukee, just five of 180 planned polling places are open, leading to hours-long lines of masked and socially distanced voters. This comes as Milwaukee voters — an electorate that includes nearly all of the state’s black population — have lagged well behind suburban counterparts in returning absentee ballots.”

The chairman of the Democratic National Committee  Tom Perez called it “voter suppression on steroids, because it was putting people’s lives in danger”.

But here is the thing.  Americans can be meretricious and fickle and frankly barmy. They can be unthinking about bigger pictures. They can be ignorant about the world. But they are also deeply serious. America has a spine of purpose. People who misunderstand the place concentrate on the froth and the nonsense, the eating competitions and the trashy TV.

But in Wisconsin, faced with what many people saw as a deliberate effort to deprive them of their rights, they queued, in masks, to protect those rights. More than a million votes were cast in person or in postal ballots. Not as many as usual but still a decent number. And enough to make a difference. A judge Mr Trump backed on the Wisconsin Supreme Court was thrown out. It felt to many like a victory for democracy in a state that will be a key battleground in 2020.

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Of course, it may well be the case that Donald Trump wins in November because in Wisconsin and other crucial swing states more voters are enthusiastic about him than about the challenger Joe Biden. He managed, in 2016, to bring people to the polls who had not voted often before, if at all. He is not just about suppression; he has given voice to people who felt themselves to be voiceless.

And Mr Biden, while he is regarded with affection by many Democrats, makes few spines tingle.  When the Fox News host Tucker Carlson asks of Mr Biden, “could he find his car in a three tiered parking garage?” many Democrats shift uneasily in their seats.

So there is still a chance it could be a conventional election. But if the Coronavirus calamity carries on, 2020 could turn out to be an election about what American democracy really is. Will people do their duty in spite of the dangers, as large numbers did in Wisconsin?

In their revolution, in their civil war, in their travails of the 20th century, plenty of Americans died for the ideal of America.

Will they do so again this November?

I was going to write a piece saying that it is a cynical move solely intended to disenfranchise potential Labour voters; having spoken to some people, I am going to be a bit more circumspect, and say that it may simply be stupid.

Let’s start with the scale of the problem the move is intended to fix, shall we? In 2018, according to the Electoral Commission, there was one conviction for electoral fraud in the UK. In 2017, there was another one. Only one of those – the 2017 one – was for personation. Between 1983 and 2015 there were a grand total of 79 convictions for personation in England and Wales, according to a 2017 FOI release. That suggests to me that there is not exactly a huge problem to be fixed here.

But Stuart Wilks-Heeg, of the University of Liverpool’s politics department, pointed out to me that it’s not always been the case. There was, for a long time, a major personation problem, which was largely solved with voter ID – in Northern Ireland.

The way Wilks-Heeg tells it, the situation sounds genuinely comic. The parties would have copies of the electoral roll, marked with information on who probably wouldn’t vote, or who would be on holiday, or who might vote late. Then they would send groups of people to each constituency – preferably girls under the age of 18, so the law would be lenient if they were caught – with disguises: wigs, glasses, and so on. And they’d go and say “I’m X, from number Y, whatever street” and cast a vote in their name.

It was a well-organised and large-scale operation. At the 1983 General Election, 149 people were arrested and 104 prosecuted in Northern Ireland for personation. There were 949 “tendered ballots”, that is, people turning up and finding their vote had already been made. There were claims that 20% of Sinn Fein’s votes were fraudulent – although it had in fact been the Ulster Unionist Party who’d been the first enthusiastic adopters of personation.

In 1985, voter ID was made a requirement; it led to a decline in personation fraud, but some still carried on, using fake ID, so in 2002 the law was changed to mandate photo ID. Now there really isn’t any personation.

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In Great Britain, there has been an issue with voter fraud, of comparable scale and seriousness to the Northern Ireland personation problem. It has been found disproportionately among British Asian communities, especially those from Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Some local communities are organised along kinship lines, forming groups called “Biraderi”, or brotherhoods. These clan-like organisations are an important part of the social support network for many British Asians, and often have their roots in very local parts of the groups’ ancestral countries; a local clan in Birmingham might stem from a particular village in Kashmir, for instance. The groups are quite hierarchical, and often vote in blocs.

This makes them a powerful voting force. The since-disgraced Liberal MP Cyril Smith was one of the first to realise the power of the British Asian vote, says Wilks-Heeg, and he courted it. Later, George Galloway, when he ran for the seat of Bethnal Green & Bow in 2005, made a trip to Bangladesh to seek the endorsement of tribal elders there, so that he could rely on the votes of the large Bangladeshi minority in Tower Hamlets.

And it is undeniably the case that some of these Biraderi have engaged in major, large-scale voting fraud. Tower Hamlets was also the scene for shocking corruption in the 2000s; the mayor, Lutfur Rahman, was removed from office in 2015 for “corrupt and illegal practices”. There were other, less high-profile incidents. Wilks-Heeg, in a 2008 paper for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, notes several convictions in Oldham, Blackburn and Birmingham among other places in the early 2000s.

However, the fraud – while impressive – involved postal votes, the process for which had been liberalised by the Blair government, and some proxy voting, and some good old-fashioned ballot-stuffing. Personation was not a factor, and voter ID wouldn’t have helped with that at all. There have been crackdowns on postal voting fraud since then, but Wilks-Heeg says that, if he were to try to rig an election in the UK – for the record, I don’t think he’s going to – he’d still start with postal votes.

Nonetheless, post-Rahman and so on, the Electoral Commission got unnerved by the idea that these “voting factories” could turn to personation, as they did in Northern Ireland. The numbers never got very high – according to the FOI release I mentioned earlier, the highest total of convictions was 11 in 1995 – but Wilks-Heeg says they thought that the British electoral system was vulnerable to personation fraud, because of the lack of any ID requirement. So in 2014 they recommended that the rest of the UK follow Northern Ireland and start mandating some form of ID.

The feared rise in personation never manifested itself, but in 2018, trials were carried out into requiring various forms of ID. The trials were small-scale, but they were fairly successful. People were turned away (Wilks-Heeg, who took part in the research, says he saw it happen), but relatively rarely, and most of those who were turned away came back later with ID.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with voter ID schemes, says Will Jennings, a professor of politics at the University of Southampton. Most EU countries have them. But, he points out, they also have national ID cards, which we don’t – we had that conversation in the early years of this century, and we emphatically didn’t want them. So, for photo ID, we’d be relying on drivers’ licences or passports, and the sort of people who are less likely to have those forms of ID are the sort of people – low income, often from ethnic minorities – who don’t tend to vote Tory.

So it looks bad coming from a Tory government, and raises the same sort of eyebrow that Republican “voter suppression” raises in the US. Changes to the rules of the electoral game are always controversial, and in the past, the convention has been that such changes get bipartisan consensus before going before Parliament. Even Blair’s postal voting changes did, and he didn’t need to because he had a massive great majority. Putting it in a Queen’s Speech without first seeking that consensus is unconventional at best.

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It’s also very weird timing. The trials were small and of course only looked at local elections, because they were the only ones that happened that year. Turnouts at local elections are much smaller and don’t look the same as turnouts at generals – the voters are usually older, and more politically informed. And the trials were of different kinds – some required photo ID, some required two utility bills, a few allowed polling cards or other ID – so that’s even less data relevant to the specific “photo ID only” version the government is proposing. “We just don’t have enough data from the pilots,” says Wilks-Heeg. “To jump from that to doing it across the board, it’s too much, too soon.”

Even more weirdly, there are two parliamentary committees looking into electoral law: a House of Commons select committee inquiry and a House of Lords committee looking into the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013. Both have finished accepting submissions and will probably submit their reports in the next year or so. It’s strange that the government has leapt ahead to do the voter ID thing rather than waiting for them to reach their conclusions and, as Wilks-Heeg puts it, “bring forward legislation which addresses all of these issues as a totality rather than just this on its own”.

So: why are they doing it? The idea that it’s an attempt to “rig the election” seems unlikely, according to both Wilks-Heeg and Jennings. The number of people turned away was small, in the hundreds. That’s not negligible – and the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch points out that it would probably skew the vote towards the Tories – but Jennings thinks that the sort of seat that it would most affect, inner cities with large British Asian populations, tend to have Labour majorities in the tens of thousands. Turning away at most one or two percent of the vote, most but not all of whom would vote Labour, probably isn’t going to make all that much difference, he thinks; certainly it’s not obvious that it would.

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Since none of these measures are going to make it through Parliament anyway – the government has a majority of minus 43 – and the Queen’s Speech is essentially acting as a sneak preview of the Tory manifesto for the inevitable winter election, I had a hypothesis that the voting registration thing was a cynical attempt to drum up support from the sort of person who is panicking about blocs of Pakistani voters committing electoral fraud.

But Jennings pointed out that even that was pretty unlikely. It might appeal to a few Brexit Party voters, but in the end, they’re going to vote on the basis of Brexit, or perhaps immigration; electoral fraud is a pretty niche issue. It could, he said, be “a Dave Brailsford approach to politics”, the marginal-gains approach to which British cycling credited its 2012 successes (along with asthma medication), but he doubts it.

It’s more likely, he said, that it’s just a badly thought-through attempt to fix a non-existent problem. We tend to import our moral panics from the US these days, like campus free speech, and often the culture war stuff doesn’t map neatly from there to here. But with the rise of a general paranoid attitude in British politics, everyone has got nervous about the legitimacy of our politics; everyone’s always running to the Electoral Commission or the Met Police with something or other, about Cambridge Analytica or Vote Leave spending or whatever, and this is just an extension of that. Our politicians don’t have to be Macchiavelian puppet-masters, they can be short-sighted panicky dimwits like the rest of us.

The concern, though, is that – as in the US – we end up losing faith in our electoral system, seeing this fraud everywhere we look, and – again as in the US – challenging every result in the courts. That’s not a positive place to be, and even the appearance of deliberately disenfranchising ethnic minorities for political gain is going to be a bad thing for our political system.

The Queen’s Speech proposal includes provision for free ID cards for voters. A previous version of this piece suggested it did not.