> Those shifting preferences could be for any number of reasons, including suppression itself. We don’t know.

So, Trump improved his position between 2016 and 2020 in Laredo, Texas, by over 27 percentage points. Two possible explanations:

Explanation (1): He achieved that outcome through the ordinary legitimate means that any politician uses to improve their vote share – adjusting his message to better appeal to that audience, investment in grassroots campaigning, adopting policies which attract those voters, etc

Explanation (2): He achieved that outcome through some form of voter suppression

Some questions:

Question (a): What is the relative probability of Explanation (1) and Explanation (2)?

Question (b): What can we infer from media coverage of this topic as to how most journalists covering it would answer question (a)?

Question (c): Does the answer to question (b) tell us anything about the answer to question (a)?

> With this knowledge I see no reason to enact Voter ID.

I don't support voter ID – but I'm sceptical of claims made by both its proponents and its opponents that the issue would have any significant impact on election outcomes. I think we'd likely get the same election outcomes whether it was enacted or not, and I'm not aware of any hard evidence against that. I think, to a great extent, it is a symbolic issue, a political shibboleth.

Worldwide, there are several models for running elections. The US uses what is called the "executive model", in which the operation of elections is overseen by elected officials (and civil servants who directly report to those elected officials). It also uses a particularly decentralised version of the executive model, in which state and even local officials play a major role in national elections.

Most other English-speaking countries instead use what is called the "independent model", in which elected officials have no direct involvement in running elections, instead they are run by one or more independent government agencies. Australia and Canada are the most directly comparable Anglophone countries to the US, since they both have federal systems (unlike the unitary system used in Ireland and New Zealand, and the devolutionary system of the UK). In both Australia and the Canada, federal elections are fully run by an independent federal agency, while there are separate independent state/provincial agencies used to run state/provincial elections.

I think the widespread lack of faith in the US voting system, found on both sides, is in large part due to its use of the inferior executive model, and switching to the independent model used in most of the rest of the English-speaking world could do a lot to improve public confidence. (There is also a lot to be said for the "judicial model" used in much of Latin America, where elections are run by the judicial branch instead of the executive branch – but I imagine the US would be more open to copying an Anglophone approach to this issue than a Latin American one.)

I realise that having the FEC take over the running of federal elections, like the AEC does in Australia or Elections Canada does in Canada, is probably a non-starter due to constitutional issues. However, if a US state was to adopt a state constitutional amendment establishing a politically independent state agency with sole power over all elections in the state, taking that power away from state and local elected officials–I can't see SCOTUS could possibly object to that.