Voter ID Laws are Bad for Democracy
Overview of Recent Voter Laws
Since the 2010 election cycle, 25 states have enacted various laws that restrict voting rights in different ways: 14 added restrictive voter ID laws, 13 increased registration requirements, 8 cut back on early voting, and 3 made restoring voting rights for those with past criminal convictions harder.
There is a huge range though even among those adding voter ID laws with states having different forms of acceptable ID. For example, in 2016 Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina all passed a law requiring an approved form of ID to vote in elections. Both Virginia and Tennessee allow people to use student IDs while South Carolina does not list it as a valid form of ID (the NCSL has a nice summary here).
This range of unstandardized requirements suggests that the different laws in each state will have differential effects on certain voting populations. Not allowing student IDs in South Carolina clearly hurts college students, especially those who come from out of state, more than other groups.
When looking at whether these voter ID laws are good to enact or not, there are several aspects we must consider: (1) the intent behind the laws and whether they are solving an actual issue i.e. the benefits and (2) the impact on turnout and whether it creates an undue burden, especially on marginal populations i.e. the costs. If overall the benefits outweigh the costs, then it suggests the laws are serving a purpose, but if not then the laws are clearly ineffective and imposing greater harm than good.
Taking into account the costs is important because at a surface level one might think that voter ID laws are not a big deal, and it is intuitive that voting should require some identity verification given how important it is to democracy (though this raises questions about the validity of other voter restriction laws like reducing early registration or closing polling places as they can’t really ostensibly be about verification).
The Benefit of Voter ID Laws
It is clear that the best version of intent behind these laws is to prevent voter fraud in US elections. So how big of an issue then is voter fraud? The best evidence we have suggests that voter fraud is a minimal and potentially even nonexistent issue.
One component of voter fraud that the current administration has doubled down on is non-citizen voter fraud. There is clear evidence that this as well is a non-issue. Prosecution records and other studies show its impact is minimal and with the large fines and checks in the system to detect fraudulent voters, there is a huge deterrent as well.
Given that today this is not an issue, the defense of voter fraud requires protecting against future risk or imposing such a low cost that enacting a law without a clear benefit is ok.
Here too, voter ID laws fail to pass this check. Most of these laws appear to have been enacted by partisan state legislatures with a clear intent on skewing election results. Research shows that state legislators are split along party lines in their support for voter ID laws. In fact the fraction of Black people among the voting age population in a district is positively associated with Republican support for voter ID laws and negatively associated with Democratic support (Black people are traditionally strong Democratic voters). Furthermore, even legislators themselves have occasionally said the intent of these laws is to advance their partisan cause publicly.
What we see then is that these laws have almost unilaterally been pushed through by Republican state legislatures with lots of suggestive and concrete evidence that their real intent is not stopping a current or future threat, but rather to make it more likely for Republicans to win elections.
There is no real benefit to these laws then.
Note this is not to say that Republicans are evil and Democrats are good. Rather, Republicans, are incentivized to drive voter turnout down. Given current demographic trends, Democrats benefit more from higher turnout as it generally leads to more young and minority voters, which are democratic leaning groups.
The Cost of Voter ID Laws
The cost of these laws is an empirical question about whether we can measure the effect of voter ID laws on turnout. As the only real benefit from voter ID laws is making voter fraud harder, it is clear that the main potential cost is that it might make it more difficult for people who are eligible to actually vote.
Measuring the impact though is quite tricky and requires the creation of a counterfactual i.e. we want to compare the turnout over time in a state with voter ID laws to what the turnout would have been in that state in a world where no voter ID law was enacted, keeping everything else the same.
In the real world this is impossible to do because we can’t run controlled experiments like this where we copy a state, change only one thing in one version, and measure the difference. We can however leverage causal inference techniques like synthetic control to measure the impact of a voter ID law on turnout.
At a high level the technique divides time into two periods: before and after the voter ID law was passed. In the before period we use turnout in states that did not pass voter ID laws to predict turnout in the state that did and essentially create a synthetic version of that state that captures what would have happened in the absence of passing a voter ID law, giving us our counterfactual. We then use this to compare what actually happened in the given state in the after period to our synthetic version, giving us the impact of Voter ID laws on turnout.
When we run this for the set of states that passed voter ID laws in 2012, we see little impact in any of them. Here for example are the results for North Carolina, which has gotten notoriety for its attempts to prevent voting with “surgical like precision” among specific groups according to the Supreme Court.
Solid lines show North Carolina’s actual voter turnout in federal elections (president and congressional) since 1980 while dotted lines show the counterfactual of what turnout would have been without the voter ID law based on other states turnout patterns with no laws. The vertical orange line shows when the voter ID law in North Carolina was passed.
Since we see no difference between North Carolina and synthetic North Carolina in turnout overall and even among specific groups like White and Black voters, there is no evidence at the state level that turnout was affected by these laws. Indeed we see similar results for all the 25 states that recently passed voter restriction laws.
Other Research mostly confirms this conclusion.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that turnout itself is not affected by these types of laws, but just that turnout is either not affected in a meaningful way that we can detect at the state level or because these laws are so recent, their actual effects will reveal themselves over time.
We should note however, that despite no aggregate effects on turnout or election results, several more detailed studies that look at individual voter populations have found reasons to suggest larger negative effects on turnout among specific groups.
Surveys in Pennsylvania of voters show that those with lower socioeconomic status are less likely to have a valid ID for example. Separate research in Michigan shows that non-white voters were significantly more likely to lack a valid ID than white voters. All these point to marginal populations bearing the brunt of the cost of these laws.
Remove These Worthless Laws
Given there is no real advantage to having these laws in place, the clear partisan nature of their enactment, and potential cost to making it harder to vote among already marginalized groups, voter ID laws serve no real purpose and should be removed as the overall cost benefit is negative.
It is unfortunate that empowering citizens has become partisan and reducing access to participation in democracy is seen as a winning tactic. The very tenets of a strong democracy involve ensuring every eligible person has access to voicing their opinion. Indeed, this fact should be uncontroversial. Instead of legislating false battles against voter fraud, we should be doing everything we can to expand access to voting, making our government stronger and a better reflection of what all citizens want the United States to be.
