Because cries of “voter suppression” strike fear into the Democratic base, they’re a good way to rally support for campaigns and lawsuits. So critics of new voter laws now portray routine elements of election administration as threatening access to the franchise. Yet there’s scant evidence that the supposed suppression binge has done much of anything to prevent actual voting or alter the outcome of elections.

Consider Voter ID. Notre Dame scholars Jeffrey Harden and Alejandra Campos, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the enactment of such laws had “negligible average effects” on partisan outcomes. In a 2021 Quarterly Journal of Economics study, Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons reported that strict ID requirements “have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age or party affiliation.” (They also found that the requirements had no detectable effect on fraud.)

When Georgia enacted a middle-of-the-road voting bill in 2021, President Joe Biden demagogically flayed it as “Jim Crow on steroids,” picking up a Four Pinocchios award from The Washington Post’s fact checker. Yet a University of Georgia survey after the election found high satisfaction with the voting experience among the state’s voters overall, and no racial difference among voters in their satisfaction.

Advocates portray reluctance to expand mail and drop box voting as an attack on the right to vote. But making these methods available (which may be a good idea) has again and again been shown to affect how people vote far more than whether they vote.

In a recent paper, political scientists Justin Grimmer of Stanford and Eitan Hersh of Tufts find “nearly all contemporary election laws have small effects on partisan election outcomes.” They look at “motor-voter” registration, list maintenance and many other issues and summarize: “Scholars have found only modest relationships between these laws and election participation and no consistent relationship between ’suppression’ laws and partisan outcomes.”

Why not? For one thing, most of the disputed laws either affect relatively few people or have impacts not tilted toward one party. If felons got re-enfranchised from coast to coast, they project, Republicans would benefit in 19 of the 50 states.

Bogus claims of widespread voter suppression worsen polarization, malign honest election administrators and undermine public confidence in our democratic system. In all this, they have much in common with bogus claims of widespread voter fraud.