Only one apparently credible study had ever suggested that voter ID laws suppress minority turnout. And that study, it turns out, is bunk, as Vox reports today — albeit with commentary further down that continues to assume the unjustified conclusion.
The original study, which was widely reported when it came out last month, has been reviewed by professors at Stanford, Yale, and UPenn, who concluded with convincing evidence that there’s basically nothing to it:
Strict voter ID laws may reduce turnout, particularly among minorities, but the evidence presented in HLN does not constitute reliable information documenting such a relationship. HLN’s measures of turnout often substantially differ from official state turnout. Further, the core analysis in HLN, a series of cross-sectional regressions, does not credibly isolate the causal effect of voter ID laws because of the presence of unobserved differences between states with and without these laws. A placebo test of HLN’s model shows a statistically significant relationship between future implementation of voter ID laws and turnout, an indication of omitted variable bias. Finally, HLN’s difference-in-differences approach, which is better equipped to address this problem, is incorrectly interpreted in the text of the paper.
This is academic-speak to say that the original study did nearly everything wrong, perhaps in the service of coming up with the conclusion they were hoping for.
They used the wrong data, they misinterpreted that data, they failed to take into account other pre-existing factors that explain differences between states with and without voter ID, and when tested, their model demonstrably assumes what it is trying to prove.
When the data are correctly examined, the difference in Hispanic turnout in states with and without voter ID varies and is “generally not significant,” and “in no specification do we find that primary or general turnout significantly declined between 2010 and 2014 in states that implemented a strict voter ID law in the interim,” and that turnout actually rose in some states that did so.
This is common sense if you think about it. There are no hurdles in 2017 America to any legal citizen or permanent resident (and in some states even illegal immigrants) getting a state ID card of some form, whether it’s a driver’s license, a plain ID card for non-drivers, or anything else. In fact, in order to comply with the governing Supreme Court decision on such laws, the states that pass them usually do as Indiana did, either allowing an alternative in the case of people who cannot afford the nominal fee for an identity card or else waiving the fees for IDs and other identity papers.
Moreover, the unjustified assumption that voter ID is racially discriminatory also leads to too many unacceptable conclusions. It would recommend the abolition of our income tax system, our alcohol control laws, our laws and regulations on air travel, and far too many other laws and regulations as overtly discriminatory. Just try starting a new job or renting an apartment without an ID and see how far you get. Does this mean the courts should strike down income tax withholding as discriminatory? That they should force landlords to rent to or banks to lend to people whose identities they can’t even verify?
All signs point to the fact that we should be making IDs easier to obtain for hard-case exceptions, not maintaining an honor-system for voting.
The only person who can get by in life without an ID today would pretty much have to be an elderly subsistence farmer who owns their property free and clear, and whose children drive them everywhere. That, or perhaps you might be homeless (even then there are provisions in most states’ laws to help you get an ID if you want it) or undocumented (ineligible to vote anyway).
Voter ID helps bolster faith in the integrity of our elections, something that both President Trump and his have critics worked over the last six months to destroy. It prevents the occasional (or systematic, because that has happened even in modern times) instance of people voting in the names of others, perhaps the deceased or those who never votes and may have even been unknowingly registered. This is a crime, and even if it is rare it cancels out someone else’s vote.
In the absence of any credible evidence of a discriminatory intent or effect, voter ID is just common sense. It should be the law everywhere, as it is in every other advanced or even developing democracy in the world, including our neighbor, Mexico.
