I’ve written more than once about how the rival “voter suppression” and “ballot integrity” schools of left and right encourage an alarmist picture of an American electoral system in crisis, even though the evidence by and large shows the election system we have tends to work pretty well. A few stories from recent weeks help to throw more cold water on the alarmism:
- Notwithstanding assumptions taken for granted on both sides in the long battle over voter ID laws, a new study finds that, to quote the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, such laws “have a negligible effect on elections and have not swayed election results for either major party.” That result is broadly consistent with an earlier study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics that found no major impacts on registration or turnout based on race, age, gender, or party affiliation. The new study, which directly examines the partisan outcome of contests, does find “the first voter ID laws produced a Democratic advantage that weakened over time”—not the Republican surge many predicted. Both studies find signs that partisan mobilization in response to the laws may have been a bigger factor than the laws themselves.
- Although no less a personage than President Joe Biden demagogically attacked a middle-of-the-road set of voting reforms in Georgia as “Jim Crow on steroids,” a University of Georgia post-election survey has now found no racial difference among Georgia voters in satisfaction with the voting experience, and high satisfaction overall. Dominic Pino at National Review has a summary.
- In Shelby County v. Holder (2013) the Supreme Court invalidated the formula under which some states had to apply for federal permission (“preclearance”) for changes in voting practices. Some reactions were hyperbolic, with an Atlantic headline claiming that the decision “broke America,” and a Huffington Post headline at oral argument raising the specter of a country going “back to 1964,” that is to say, before the federal Voting Rights Act opened up the franchise in the South. But a new paper by Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Eric McGhee, and Christopher Warshaw finds little sign that the Shelby County ruling worked to curtail minority representation in the formerly covered states, as had been feared. Excerpts from the abstract:
Preclearance was granted only if plans wouldn’t retrogress, that is, reduce minority representation.…So what happened to minority representation in formerly covered states after Section 5’s protections were withdrawn? This article is the first to tackle this important question. We examine all states’ district plans before and after the 2020 round of redistricting at the congressional, state senate, and state house levels. Our primary finding is that there was little retrogression in formerly covered states. In sum, the number of minority ability districts in these states actually rose slightly. We also show that formerly covered states were largely indistinguishable from formerly uncovered states in terms of retrogression. If anything, states unaffected by Shelby County retrogressed marginally more than did states impacted by the ruling.…
- Meanwhile, on the other side, groups claiming fraud in the 2020 election convinced authorities in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania to conduct a full hand recount of all 59,000 ballots cast in the county. The results: only a handful of votes were changed and the outcome remained virtually identical to the 2020 machine tabulation. (Because of inescapable judgment calls involving ambiguously marked ballots and the like, hand recount results themselves will inevitably differ one from the next; for reasons of this sort, it is not at all clear that hand tabulation would offer any edge in either consistency or accuracy over current methods of machine tabulation.)
The scholarly findings concerning voter ID and retrogression at least have the merit of being somewhat counterintuitive. There is nothing at all counterintuitive in bouncing the rubble one more time on claims that the 2020 presidential election was somehow rigged. Claims of irregularity from supporters of former President Trump have led over two years and more to a remarkably consistent succession of factual and legal dry holes. To underscore matters, papers filed as part of a defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems now make clear that at the largest media outlet promoting stolen-election claims, Fox News, a long roster of anchors, executives, and others did not believe many of the election-fraud claims the network was airing, deeming them “dangerously insane,” “this B.S.,” “really crazy stuff” and so on.
The election system does have some genuine problems. They are best addressed by setting aside both partisan hyperbole and crackpot conspiracism.
