"Why? ...don't you agree that voter ID laws are applied equally to every voter regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or religion? "
Applied equally, yes; accessed equally, no. Actually, I take that back. They aren't even applied equally, cuz I don't need to show one to vote by mail.
What We Know About Voter ID Laws
Voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise minority communities.
Fraga and Miller found that black voters constituted 11.4 percent of those voting in Texas in 2016 with ID but 16.1 percent of those voting without ID, which shows clear evidence of a disparate racial impact. Likewise, Latino voters made up 19.8 percent of those voting with an ID but 20.7 percent of those voting without an ID. So even if voter ID laws haven’t swung election outcomes, they can deny thousands of people their right to vote — denials that fall disproportionately on black and Latino citizens. Whether voter ID laws swing elections is far from their only important consequence.
Those disparate impacts are clear from a second newly released study, too, which also used individual-level records to provide a more granular view of precisely who is affected by voter ID policies. In Michigan’s 2016 general election, voters who arrived at the polls without ID were able to vote after they signed an affidavit. Researchers Phoebe Henninger, Marc Meredith and Michael Morse2 collected these affidavits to identify a set of voters who would have been turned away under a stricter policy, like the laws in Georgia, Virginia and Wisconsin. By their calculation, about 28,000 voters — or 0.6 percent of 2016 Michigan voters — lacked photo identification.
Those 28,000 voters were more nonwhite and more Democratic than the Michigan electorate overall. Henninger and her co-authors estimated that nonwhite voters were between 2.5 and 6 times as likely as white voters to lack voter ID. And while Michigan doesn’t record partisan registration, the researchers’ model-based estimates suggest that more than 70 percent of those filing affidavits would be Democratic primary voters.
Older voters can be affected by voter ID laws, too.In another study, this one published in 2017 by the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, I teamed up with Meredith, Morse, Sarah Smith and Jesse Yonder to estimate the effects of a policy change in Virginia between the 2013 gubernatorial election and the 2014 midterm election. Virgina went from a law that required identification but accepted IDs without photos to a law that demanded specific forms of photo ID.3 In 2014, there were just 474 provisional ballots cast statewide for lack of photo ID, which is a small fraction of the 2.19 million voters who voted in the election.4 So implementation matters: That muted impact may have been partly the product of a statewide mailer telling registered voters without driver’s licenses about the new law.
Still, the provisional ballots were more common in precincts where there were more voters without a driver’s license and more voters over 85. That makes sense: Those are places where fewer voters are likely to have the requisite photo ID. As Matt Barreto and his co-authors have found in multiple surveys, elderly voters — like black and Latino voters — are more likely to lack photo ID than the voting population overall. In fact, in the Virginia study, the share of voters in a precinct who were 85 or older was much more strongly associated with the percentage of provisional ballots cast by voters lacking ID than were other demographic factors, such as the share of voters who were black or Hispanic. That, in turn, leads to another observation about voter ID laws:
fivethirtyeight.com |
