States that have beefed-up voter identification requirements saw a decline in election turnout — with black, young and newly registered voters most likely to stay away, a new nonpartisan congressional study shows.
Analysts who conducted the report for the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative agency, also said they couldn’t find sufficient evidence that those same laws effectively fight voter fraud.
The study, which comes less than a month before voters go to the polls, helps boost Democratic calls to repeal strict voter ID laws instituted by several Republican-controlled states in recent years.
Republicans say the laws help prevent voter fraud, which they say is rampant and undetected. But Democrats and voting rights advocates say their true goal is to suppress voter turnout among traditional Democratic constituencies such as blacks, students, the elderly and the poor, who are less likely to have valid state-issued IDs than other groups.
“This study confirms the real impact of Republican efforts to limit access to the ballot box,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., one of five Democratic senators who asked for the study. “Playing politics with the right to vote is a shameful practice.”
The GAO looked at several existing reports on voter turnout, as well as conducting its own study comparing election turnout in Kansas and Tennessee, which tightened voter ID requirements between the 2008 and 2012 elections, to voting in four states that didn’t change their identification requirements.
The GAO found that voter turnout among eligible and registered voters fell about 2 percent more in Kansas and from 2 to 3 percent more in Tennessee than in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware and Maine, suggesting that the voter ID rule changes caused the bigger drops.
In both Kansas and Tennessee, compared with the four other states, GAO found that turnout was reduced by larger amounts among registered voters aged 18 to 23 and among those who had been registered less than 1 year. The drop was also more pronounced among blacks than with whites, Hispanics or Asians.
Estimated falloff among black voters was about 4 percent greater than it was among whites in Kansas, and almost 2 percent larger among blacks than for whites in Tennessee, the report said.
Voter turnout nationwide was about 58 percent of eligible voters in 2012, about a 3.5 percent drop from 2008, when President Obama first ran for the White House.
GAO analysts said their and other studies identified few instances of in-person voter fraud.
The Kansas, Tennessee and Arkansas secretary of state offices disputed the GAO’s findings, saying Kansas and Tennessee weren’t reliable comparison states.
But the GAO defended its methodology, calling it “robust and valid” and that it controlled varying factors to make fair comparisons.
