Pretty long history in the US of gerrymandering, ID voter laws and reducing voting stations that pretty directly limit people's ability to vote.
I think anger just blocks rational thought.
- gerrymandering: voting for someone that will gerrymander is once again voting for your own interests (this time at the expense of democratic values). If the prone-to-gerrymander candidate you are voting for does in fact gerrymander, it is likely to be in favor of that political party (which is the one you voted for).
- Voter ID: I think everyone who wants stronger voter ID laws and is voting for them is not particularly worried about not having an ID when it comes time to vote in the next election.
- Reducing voting stations is an interesting one, but again I think most of the people who would vote for a party that reduces voting stations are not worried about access to them (either because they can easily take time off to vote, they are quite mobile, or because they are happy with mail-in-ballots).
So I think you are helping make my point, but in the opposite direction of how you meant – those are a bunch of examples of people voting selfishly in a way that could hurt democracy. I want people that would vote for such things to vote against their own self-interest, and instead vote for what is best for the health of our democratic republic.
The voterID one for example, people who can vote one election that have otherwise out of date ID will find themselves unable to vote in the next election.
VoterID can be especially tricky in the US due to not having a Nation ID or a federally run election see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Uni... for a good summary.
I would imagine a pretty "rational" perspective would be to be in favor of policies that allow you to vote again in the future (just in general).
Yes, there is no "federal ID" (besides passports and passport cards), but if you've had an ID before, it is not difficult to get a new one in any US state.
What I've described above isn't a theoretical problem, it is an actual occurring issue that has happened time after time.
I don't want to say it's "privileged" but I think you are personally down playing the difficulty these issues raised on specific groups.
If you read the Wikipedia article you will see that minority groups are significantly less likely to have up to date state IDs.
And respectfully anyone without a permanent address can also have a very hard time getting ID.
That point I'm making is that people in these groups will still vote for policies that directly negatively impact their ability to participate in democracy. Not a strawman argument, based on actual voter data.
It could be a part of the larger problem that a decreasing percentage of Americans are even voting at all.