Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes

Zoltan Hajnal, University of California, San Diego
Nazita Lajevardi, University of California, San Diego
Lindsay Nielson, Bucknell University
Source: The Journal of Politics, volume 79, number 2. Published online January 5, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/688343

Question to be Answered: 
Do voter ID laws reduce participation and skew the electorate in favor of one set of interests and against another set of interests? 

Premise: The core question is not who could be affected but is instead who is affected. Existing studies on the effects of voter suppression laws have been limited and most occurred before states enacted strict identification requirements. These studies have not found strong effects, although there are more rigorous ways of testing the effects of voter ID laws on voter suppression. 

Data Source: Validated voting data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study

The CCES is a national stratified sample survey, administered over the Internet, of over 50,000 respondents by YouGov/Polimetrix. It includes a large and representative sample of respondents from every state.

Findings: Strict identification laws have a negative impact on the turnout of racial and ethnic minorities in both primaries and general elections. Additionally, voter ID laws tend to benefit the political right (conservatives) more so than the political left (liberals).

General Background:

• There are two major types of voter ID requirements:
• Strict voter ID laws require identification in order to cast a regular ballot. 
• More lenient laws request, but do not require, voters to show some kind of identification document at the polls. These laws can also be distinguished by whether or not they allow or consider non-photo identification.
• In 1950, South Carolina became the first state to ask for identification in order to vote at a polling site.
• Prior to 2006, no state required identification to vote.
• Currently 34 states have some form of voter ID law. 11 of these states have implemented strict ID laws that require a person to show identification in order to vote.

How could voter ID laws affect voter participation?

Directly. 

• Voters may hear of the new ID requirements and decide to stay home.
• Voters may be turned away at the polls due to invalid ID.

Indirectly.

• Even if they have the necessary ID, voters may decide not to vote because they feel targeted by the ID policy ( This is especially true for racial minorities, who have been the subject of election-related violence at different points in American history).

Arguments in favor of voter ID laws:

• Supporters believe voter fraud is a real and potentially widespread phenomenon that could alter electoral outcomes and erode faith in democracy.
• Voter identification laws do not reduce the participation of citizens because they do not prevent legitimate voters from entering the voting booth.
• Additionally, valid ID is easy to acquire, thereby not limiting or discouraging people from participating in an election.
• Critics believe that little or no voter fraud currently exists, making potentially expensive measures like voter ID laws unnecessary. 

Arguments against voter ID laws:

• Voter ID laws serve as effective barriers that limit the legitimate participation of racial and ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged groups.
• These laws are generally passed by Republicans and tend to emerge in states with larger minority populations and greater partisan competition, which indicates that there could be political motivation behind the passage of these laws.

Current Understanding:

• Several studies appear to have uncovered a relatively large number of Americans without proper identification and lack of identification is particularly acute among minority populations, poor populations, and young population.
• Additional studies show that poll workers disproportionately ask minorities for identification (which indicates that the law is not being applied evenly or fairly to all populations).
• On the question of who votes and who does not, the research is about equally divided.

If there's no evidence one way or the other, why keep studying it?

The authors of this study believe that there are three fundamental problems with previous research:

1. Scholars have almost exclusively analyzed elections that occurred before the strictest voter identification laws were put in the place.
• The less rigid requirements of the more lenient voter ID laws are unlikely to have much impact on election turnout since there are multiple alternatives available to voters (which means more accessibility). However, the most restrictive voter ID laws have been implemented within the last few election cycles, which means that any research prior to those elections is out of date. There has not been enough research focused exclusively on the very strict voter ID laws that tend to represent the highest potential to show evidence of current voter suppression effects.
2. Much of the current research depends heavily on self-reported rather than validated turnout. 
• Racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to over report (meaning that they are more likely to say that they did vote when they did not) than non-minority groups. This potentially skews the data collected in previous studies since it isn't necessarily representative of the actual voter turnout numbers.
3. There has been little empirical analysis of the political consequences of strict voter ID laws.
• Several studies have examined both political and partisan motivations for adopting voter ID laws, but more work needs to be done on the direct impact on partisan and ideological voters. In other words, even though most voter ID laws are passed by mainly Republicans, there is no clear evidence that the result is definitively detrimental to Democrats.

I've heard a lot about how these laws affect minority groups. What does that mean?

Some of the individual voter factors that were included in this analysis were:

• Race and ethnicity. Respondents self-identified as white, black, Latino, Asian American, or indicated that they were multiracial. 
• Partisanship. Respondents self-identified as more liberal or more conservative based on a multi-point system of party identification and personal ideology.
• Age. Measured in years.
• Education level.
• Family income. 
• Nativity. Based on whether respondent is foreign born, first generation American, or other. 
• Gender.
• Marital status. Married or not married. 
• Number of children.
• Union membership.
• Home ownership.
• Employment status.
• Religion. Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Atheist, or other.

What about different state laws?

Researchers examined a number of factors at the state level, including: 

• Whether or not a state allows early voting.
• If a state has all-mail elections.
• Whether a state allows no-excuse absentee voting. 
• Some states offer "no-excuse" absentee voting, allowing any registered voter to request an absentee without requiring that the voter state a reason for his/her desire to vote absentee.
• Number of days prior to an election that people can register to vote.

How is this study better than previous studies?

1. The authors of this study address the three shortcomings listed above by focusing on elections between 2006-2014 in order to capture results that are most likely to be affected by the most restrictive of voter ID laws. 
2. The research focuses exclusively on the states with the most restrictive voter ID laws rather than including all states with any form of voter ID law in place. The underlying belief is that stricter laws have the greatest potential to dramatically impact voter turnout.
3. Data used is based entirely on validated voting. This means that each reported vote is checked against official voting records to determine if each respondent who claimed to vote actually did.

What are the limitations of the study?

Unfortunately, the authors of this study were unable to determine the degree to which indirect effects impacted voting. The data they used included no questions about feelings of threat, alienation, or discouragement, so they could not measure that impact. Ultimately this means that they were able to test to see if voter ID laws lower turnout, but they cannot show how they do so.

Conclusion:

The pattern in both primary and general elections is clear. There are substantial drops in minority turnout in strict voter ID states and no real changes in white turnout. For example, in general elections, the model predicts that Latinos are 10% less likely to turn out in states with strict ID laws than in states without strict ID regulations, all else equal.  Even when controlling for party affiliation these patterns of voter suppression of minority groups hold true. However, there was no discernible difference between states that have no voter identification laws and those that only request some form of identification (photo or otherwise).

So what does all of this mean?

In all cases, the significant effects are politically meaningful. Strict voter ID laws both diminish minority participation and increase the gap in the participation rate between whites and nonwhites. White Americans already generally participate at higher rates than others, but when states institute strict voter ID laws, that advantage grows measurably.

Republicans and conservatives are significantly less likely than Democrats and liberals to experience declines in turnout in primary contests when strict voter ID laws are in place. Democratic turnout drops by an estimated 8.8 percentage points in primary elections when strict photo identification laws are in place. By comparison, the predicted drop for Republicans is only 3.6 percentage points.

The effects of voter ID laws that we see here are in some ways similar to the impact of measures like poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, and at-large elections that were used by the white majority decades and centuries ago to help deny blacks many basic rights. Both sets of measures— new and old—were instituted by advocates who claimed they would help to ensure the integrity and legitimacy of democracy. Both sets of measures also serve to distort democracy and reduce the influence of racial minorities.

In a country that prides itself on the concept of fair and free elections, we need to ask ourselves whether strict voter ID laws are working towards that goal or against it.