“Republicans
Are Trying to Make Sure Minorities and Young People Don’t Vote This
November,” reads a Mother Jones headline. How?
MJ continues…
…shorter voting hours, restrictions on voter registration
drives, and the requirement that voters present a government ID or
proof of citizenship to cast a ballot.
With regard to imposing voter ID requirements, a new study
reports that the nefarious Republican plot is likely to fail if the
goal is to suppress black and Hispanic votes relative to white
votes. Researchers Rene Rocha from the University of Iowa and
Tetsuya Matsubayashi from Osaka University in Japan have published
an article, “The
Politics of Race and Voter ID Laws in the States: The Return of Jim
Crow?” in the current issue of the Political Research
Quarterly.
They do find that states with relatively small minority group
populations and dominated by Republican governors and legislatures
have passed more voter ID requirements, both photo ID and non-photo
ID, than states with larger minority group populations and/or
dominated by Democrats. But what effect do such requirements have
on voter turnout?
In a September, 2014 report, the Government
Accountability Office noted, for example, that one study that
compared ethnic subgroup voting in Kansas and Tennessee (which had
adopted new voter ID requirements) to five states that had not done
so, found that…
…turnout was reduced among African-American registrants by 3.7
percentage points more than among Whites in Kansas and 1.5
percentage points more than among Whites in Tennessee. However, we
did not find reductions in turnout among Asian-American or Hispanic
registrants, as compared with White registrants, thus suggesting
that the laws did not have larger effects on these registrants.
However, in summarizing the general research on voter ID
requirements, the GAO found:
Another 10 studies GAO reviewed showed mixed effects of various
forms of state voter ID requirements on turnout. All 10 studies
examined general elections before 2008, and 1 of the 10 studies
also included the 2004 through 2012 general elections. Five of
these 10 studies found that ID requirements had no statistically
significant effect on turnout; in contrast 4 studies found
decreases in turnout and 1 found an increase in turnout that were
statistically significant.
The study cited by the GAO that showed minority group vote
suppression and most other prior research compared voting changes
between states that had adopted voter ID requirements and those
that had not. The researchers in the study Political Research
Quarterly parse time series data noting changes in voting
participation before and after voter ID requirements were adopted
in individual states. Contrary to the earlier state-to-state
comparisons, the new study using time-series data extending over
the past 30 years finds:
Our primary explanatory variables, photo ID and nonphoto ID
laws, have no statistically discernible relationship with the
probability that whites, blacks, and Latinos voted in the general
elections between 1980 and 2010 except that the nonphoto ID law has
a positive and significant relationship with Latino turnout. In
short, more stringent ID requirements for voting have no deterring
effect on individual turnout across different racial and ethnic
groups.
The GAO report also found that data on voter fraud is not
centralized and scanty in any case, but did note that …
…there were no apparent cases of in-person voter impersonation
charged by DOJ’s [Department of Justice] Criminal Division or by
U.S. Attorney’s offices anywhere in the United States, from 2004
through July 3, 2014.
Frankly, whatever the intentions of Republican lawmakers with
regard to imposing more stringent voter ID requirements – prevent
fraud or suppress votes – the data suggest that the requirements
are a big waste of time and money.
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