Are state-level Republicans engaged in a massive conspiracy to carry out “voter suppression”? Are their Democratic counterparts party to an equally sinister scheme to ease the way for vote fraud? I argued last month that for all its acrimony, this year’s “endless Blue‐Red wrangling over election procedure has been largely a distraction and a sideshow.” In particular, voter turnout soared last year, in states that did and also in states that did not liberalize ballot procedure, rather than being throttled as the suppression thesis might have it. At the same time, claims that widespread voter fraud might have affected the outcome of the presidential race have met with consistent and often humiliating refutation.
Meanwhile, in May, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a study suggesting that one of the most hotly contested election practices of all, voter ID laws, may not make a detectable difference to outcomes either way:
U.S. states increasingly require identification to vote—an ostensible attempt to deter fraud that prompts complaints of selective disenfranchisement. Using a difference-in-differences design on a panel data set with 1.6 billion observations, 2008–2018, we find that the laws have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation. These results hold through a large number of specifications. .…The lack of negative impact on voter turnout cannot be attributed to voters’ reaction against the laws, measured by campaign contributions and self-reported political engagement. However, the likelihood that nonwhite voters were contacted by a campaign increases by 4.7 percentage points, suggesting that parties’ mobilization might have offset modest effects of the laws on the participation of ethnic minorities. Finally, strict ID requirements have no effect on fraud, actual or perceived. Overall, our findings suggest that efforts to improve elections may be better directed at other reforms.
As colleague Ilya Shapiro has argued, large, consistent majorities of Americans, including majorities of Democrats and racial minorities, support voter ID. That doesn’t prove they’re right, of course; here are some reasons they might not be. At the same time, alternate methods of security, such as signature matching, have problems of their own, as Ilya notes:
Colorado, now a solidly blue state that votes entirely by mail, rejected 29,000 ballots last fall (about 1 in 112) because the mailed signatures didn’t match those on file. That doesn’t count the 11,000 who were allowed to “cure” the issue by texting in a picture of a — gasp — photo ID. Illustrating the point further, the Tampa Bay Times just came out with an amusing article about how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s signature has changed over the years, apparently leading to his ballot being tossed in a 2016 primary.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008) that the use of voter ID is broadly consistent with the U.S. Constitution, although legal challenges occasionally prevail against one or another state’s law.
Citing two other studies of the subject, Prof. William Baude observes the laws’ seeming lack of effect on either electoral participation or fraud but adds:
On the other hand, the fact that so many political groups with real skin in the game spend time fighting about voter ID laws makes me wonder if the studies are missing something. Why would legislatures spend political capital enacting them if they didn’t do something? Why would groups spend scarce resources fighting them if they didn’t do something? So maybe the groups who are affected by the laws know something that isn’t showing up in the studies.
Yet back to the first hands, sometimes it happens that the studies are right and the people with real world experience are wrong. …So I just don’t know.
I don’t either, but in the absence of stronger evidence that these laws matter much, it’s hard for me to get invested in the apocalyptic version of either side’s views.
