How do perceived partisan and social ramifications of voting rights extensions affect public support for expanding the franchise? Through two original survey experiments, I find that partisan electoral concerns consistently and significantly influence Americans’ support for expanding the right to vote to citizens with previous felony convictions, non-citizens, and younger Americans. When respondents expect enfranchisement to benefit the opposite party, they are much less likely to support voting rights extensions. However, there is a striking asymmetry in such responses: support is virtually unchanged when enfranchisement is projected to benefit their own party versus when it is projected to be electorally neutral. Meanwhile, respondents from both political parties hold almost identical priors that the Democratic Party would very slightly benefit more from voting rights extensions. Together, the empirical patterns suggest that the mass public is mainly motivated by electoral threat when deciding whether to expand the franchise. My results provide valuable insights into the prospects for further voting rights expansions in the US, and imply that perceived electoral non-neutrality is a major obstacle to increasing democratic inclusion in this country.
