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Measuring the Effects of Voter Identification Laws
By NATE SILVER JULY 15, 2012 9:28 AM July 15, 2012 9:28 am
Almost every day, I get e-mails and Twitter messages asking me about the effect of voter identification laws on turnout. Most of these messages, I presume, are from Democrats. They worry that more onerous laws, like those in Pennsylvania, could make it more difficult for Democratic-leaning voting groups like African-Americans and young voters to participate in this November’s election.
These concerns are perfectly logical — although it is also possible to exaggerate the effects that these laws might have. Academic studies suggest that they very probably reduce turnout, but not by more than a couple of percentage points. And although Democratic voters may be more affected by the laws, some Republican voters will be disenfranchised by them, too.
As I mentioned, there are quite a number of academic studies that seek to evaluate the effect of identification laws on voter turnout; John Sides has compiled a list of them here; or you can do some searching for yourself on Google Scholar.
On the surface, these studies seem to disagree with one another about whether or not there is any effect on turnout from harsher voter identification laws. But if you read them in more detail, you’ll find that much of the disagreement is semantic rather than substantive.
There is something of a consensus in the literature, in fact, about the rough magnitude of the effects. The stricter laws, like those that require photo identification, seem to decrease turnout by about 2 percent as a share of the registered voter population.
Whether this effect is deemed to be “statistically significant” or not varies from study to study. It depends on what particular type of statistical test the researcher has applied, and how much data he or she is looking at.
Statistical significance, however, is a funny concept. It has mostly to do with the volume of data that you have, and the sampling error that this introduces. Effects that may be of little practical significance can be statistically significant if you have tons and tons of data. Conversely, findings that have some substantive, real-world impact may not be deemed statistically significant, if the data is sparse or noisy.
My view is that something which might reduce turnout by 2 percent in a key state is meaningful in a practical sense — at least if you looking at the election in a detail-oriented way, as we often do.
Statistical significance tests start by specifying a null hypothesis. In the case of these studies, the null hypothesis is that voter identification laws do not impact turnout. Then it’s a question of whether the data is robust enough to persuade you otherwise. Some studies say that it is, and others say it isn’t.
However, the null hypothesis is not very logical in this case. Why should we give the benefit of the doubt to notion that voter ID laws will not affect turnout? The mechanism for how these laws work is very simple, after all. Some people show up at the polling place and find that they are not able to cast a ballot (or must vote by provisional ballot) when they otherwise would have voted. It would be stunning if these laws didn’t have some downward effect on the number of legal votes counted. (If you’re using Bayesian statistics, the hypothesis that voter ID laws do impact turnout would be your prior belief.)
In other words, although the effects seem to be small, and although their precise magnitude is uncertain, the position that they don’t have any effect at all is hard to defend.
With that said, there is also not necessarily a reason to think that the laws would reduce turnout by more than a couple of percentage points. It’s important to keep the following in mind:
The vast majority of adults do have some sort of identification.
Many people who do not have identification are not registered to vote — or if they are registered, they are unlikely to turn out.
The laws may be inconsistently enforced by thousands and thousands of poll workers at the precinct level.
In many cases, voters without proper identification can cast a provisional ballot, which could eventually be counted in the event of a vote-counting dispute.
The campaigns have an opportunity to educate their voters about ID requirements as part of their turnout operations.
News media accounts, like some of those about the new voter ID laws in Pennsylvania, sometimes seize on the most dramatic estimates of the effects of these laws — rather than the most accurate ones.
It has been reported, for instance, that about 750,000 Pennsylvanians, or about 9 percent of the state’s registered voter pool, do not have a ID issued by the state’s Department of Transportation. The 750,000-voter figure, however, includes some cases where there are database-matching problems: for instance, a woman is listed by her married surname in one database and her maiden surname in another may be included on that list, even though she should have few problems voting. It includes some cases of voters whose registrations are inactive. And it includes voters who will have some valid form of ID other than that issued by the Department of Transportation, like a passport, which would still make them eligible to vote. Based on the experiences of other states, it is more likely that these laws will prevent something like 2 or 3 percent of registered voters from actually casting a ballot, rather than 9 percent.
Still, that could be meaningful depending on which candidate these voters would have chosen. None of the studies I mentioned have sought to measure how a decline in turnout could effect the Democratic and Republican candidates in particular, rather than the overall figure.
But some implied that Democratic-leaning voting groups, especially African-Americans and Hispanics, were more likely to be affected. Others found that educational attainment was the key variable in predicting whom these laws might disenfranchise, with race being of secondary importance. If that’s true, some white voters without college degrees could also be affected, and they tend to vote Republican.
Nevertheless, it’s clear enough that stricter voter ID requirements are probably bad for Democrats, on balance. In almost every state where the ID laws have been at issue, Republican governors and legislatures have been on the side of passing stricter ones, while Democrats have sought to block them.
I sought to back into an estimate of the net effects of these laws, therefore, in a couple of different ways. First, I compared the popular vote in each state in 2008 against the turnout there, as listed at Michael McDonald’s Web site. As a control, I looked at the party identification of all adults in the state in 2008, according to Gallup polling. This analysis suggested that for every one-percentage point increase in voter turnout, Barack Obama’s margin over John McCain increased by about six-tenths (0.6) of a point in 2008.
Alternatively, I looked at the change in the popular vote margin between 2004 and 2008 as a function of the change in turnout. (For this version of the analysis, I excluded states that were the home state of any of the presidential or vice presidential candidates in 2004 or 2008, since this introduces noise related to native-son effects.) This version indicated that a 1-point increase in turnout increased Mr. Obama’s margin over John McCain by about 0.4 percentage points in 2008.
Both of these estimates are crude — I am open to looking into more robust means of estimating these effects, in case any of you have ideas.
But they square with the general notion that higher turnout is helpful to Democrats, on balance. If you take the average between them, it suggests that a 1-point increase in turnout would improve the Democrat’s margin in the popular vote by a half a percentage point, accounting for other factors.
I then looked at which states have changed their voting laws since 2008, according to the National Council of State Legislatures. Their Web site classifies states along a 4-point spectrum from having no voter ID laws to strict photo identification requirements.
Pennsylvania, for instance, went from having no voter ID laws to a strict photo ID requirement. Based on the academic studies, I estimate that this will reduce turnout by about 2.4 percent as a share of registered voters. And based on my formula to convert changes in turnout to changes in the popular vote, I estimate that this would reduce President Obama’s margin against Mitt Romney by a net of 1.2 percentage points.
Changes for other states are listed below; I exclude cases where changes in a voter ID law have been struck down by courts, or are pending approval by the Department of Justice. Note that, other than Pennsylvania, no swing states have passed major changes to voter ID laws, although others like Wisconsin have sought to pass laws that have been struck down.
Estimated Effect of Voter ID Law Changes, 2008-2012
Starting with Saturday’s forecast, these shifts are applied to the “state fundamentals” calculation that the FiveThirtyEight forecast model uses along with the polls in each state. The state fundamentals calculation is based on large part on how the state voted in 2008 or 2004 — so if there have been changes in the fundamentals since that time which we think might have predictable effects, it is worth accounting for them.
I do not apply any adjustment to the polls themselves. My notion is that the pollsters are responsible for accounting for these effects, such as by means of their likely voter models or their mechanism of accounting for registered voters.
The effects of the adjustment are ultimately fairly minor. In Pennsylvania, for instance, it reduced Mr. Obama’s chances of winning the state to 82.6 percent from 84.2 percent, according to the model’s estimate. Still, it makes Pennsylvania a little closer, and slightly increases the chance that it will be the tipping point state in the election.
One last thing to consider: although I do think these laws will have some detrimental effect on Democratic turnout, it is unlikely to be as large as some Democrats fear or as some news media reports imply — and they can also serve as a rallying point for the party bases. So although the direct effects of these laws are likely negative for Democrats, it wouldn’t take that much in terms of increased base voter engagement — and increased voter conscientiousness about their registration status — to mitigate them
Reading 2
Analysis: Scant Evidence for Abbott's "Rampant" Voter Fraud
by Ross Ramsey March 15, 2016 151Comments
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Gov. Greg Abbott accepts Site Selection's 2015 Governor's Cup Award on behalf of the state of Texas on March 9, 2016.
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Gov. Greg Abbott accepts Site Selection's 2015 Governor's Cup Award on behalf of the state of Texas on March 9, 2016.
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The governor of Texas thinks that fraud in the electoral system that put him and others in office is “rampant.”
He can’t back that up.
Greg Abbott was asked on Monday what he thought about President Obama’s throwdown last week on the state’s lousy voter turnout.
“The folks who are governing the good state of Texas aren't interested in having more people participate,” the president told The Texas Tribune’s Evan Smith at South by Southwest Interactive.
The chief of those “folks” would rather limit turnout than expand on what he seems to think is an election system that has run off the side of the road.
“What I find is that leaders of the other party are against efforts to crack down on voter fraud,” Abbott said. “The fact is that voter fraud is rampant. In Texas, unlike some other states and unlike some other leaders, we are committed to cracking down on voter fraud.”
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Strong word, rampant. The handy office thesaurus offers these synonyms: uncontrolled, unrestrained, unchecked, unbridled, widespread; out of control, out of hand, rife.
Does three cases of fraud for every 1 million votes strike you as “unbridled?”
“We will continue our effort to crack down and make sure there is no illegal voting in Texas,” the governor told a roomful of news people. “We don’t want to open the system up to methodologies or ways of voting that would promote or allow voter fraud.”
He argued about the state’s turnout being low, noting that turnout in this month’s two party primaries combined was higher, in raw numbers, than ever before.
That’s true — and also incomplete. Almost 30,000 more people showed up to vote in the 2016 primaries than in the 2008 primaries. But there are almost 1.5 million more registered voters now than there were eight years ago, according to the Texas Secretary of State. Turnout this year was 30 percent. Turnout in 2008 was 33.2 percent.
The overall number of voters was 0.7 percent higher this year. The proportion of actual vs. registered voters dropped 9.6 percent when the 2008 and 2016 numbers are compared.
Either way, it wasn’t impressive. Only one primary state that had voted before the governor spoke had a lower turnout: Louisiana.
Give the governor his due: He and Ken Paxton, his successor at the attorney general’s office, have found instances of voter fraud in Texas.
A study done by News21, an investigative journalism project at Arizona State University, looked at open records from Texas and other states for the years 2000-2011 and found 104 cases of voter fraud had been alleged in Texas over that decade.
Chew on this: If you only count the Texans who voted in November general elections — skipping Democratic and Republican primaries and also special and constitutional elections — 35.8 million people voted during the period covered by the ASU study.
They found 104 cases of voter fraud among 35.8 million votes cast. That’s fewer than three glitches per 1 million votes.
Who likes that? Nobody, unless they’re benefiting from the stolen votes. You can’t defend fraud, but you can decide how much attention it deserves.
For instance, in its 2013-14 biennial report to the Legislature, the Texas Ethics Commission has a chart on how many ethics complaints it handled in those two years. These are predominantly cases involving campaign finance and lobby reporting by candidates, officeholders and the people who are paid to try to win their influence. In that single two-year period, the commission resolved 227 complaints through agreed orders out of 513 sworn complaints that were filed with the agency.
To recap, that’s twice as many ethics stinkers in two years than voter fraud stinkers in 10 years.
“Voters and citizens repeatedly say, ‘Why go vote if we’re going to have corrupt leaders in office?’” Abbott said. “So we need to root out and eliminate corrupt leaders and root out and eliminate corruption in the voting process, and that means greater ballot security, not less ballot security.”
The mechanics of this are inescapable: State officials don’t seem to want to change the voter laws that got them elected, using the “rampant” fraud in the system as their excuse for laws that keep turnout low. But the same officials regularly gag on proposals to tighten the laws that regulate their own political money and behavior.
They’d rather blame the customers — or turn them away.
Reading 3
Without a personal identification card issued by some level of government, you are a second-class citizen. You cannot board an airplane, ride an Amtrak train, buy a six-pack of beer or a pack of cigarettes, open a checking account, enter many public and some private office buildings or even attend an NAACP convention without proving that you are who you say you are. You cannot even qualify for means-tested public support programs such as Medicaid without valid identification.
These requirements have provoked strikingly little objection from the American public. No one argues that it is grossly discriminatory to deprive people without picture IDs access to this wide range of places, programs and activities.
But when it comes to voting, that is exactly the argument. The Democratic Party, the attorney general of the United States and a vocal chorus from the civil rights community are waging war on voter photo ID laws enacted recently in 10 states, laws they see as part of a new voter suppression movement.
In their view, measures ostensibly designed to limit the franchise to people who are U.S. citizens and legal residents of the jurisdiction in which they seek to vote have the real purpose of disfranchising poor people in general and especially poor African Americans and Latinos.
The charge leveled against photo ID requirements has a particularly nasty echo: It is, critics say, no different than the Jim Crow poll tax used in Southern states until the mid-1960s to keep blacks from the voting booth. But the Supreme Court has addressed that issue. In a 2008 decision upholding Indiana’s voter ID law, the opinion of the court, written by Justice John Paul Stevens — certainly no conservative — dismissed the poll tax argument on the grounds that the state had a legitimate interest in preventing voter fraud. Five justices agreed with him.
Critics of ID requirements assert that voting is special — a right, not a privilege, and therefore not comparable to things like driving a car or gaining access to the NAACP convention. But the distinction is not so clear. Medicaid is arguably a right for those who are income eligible.
And rights are not absolute. Nine-year-olds cannot vote; nor can illegal immigrants. An estimated 1 million illegal immigrants live in Texas today. If many of them turned up at the polls and were able to vote in the absence of a requirement for government-issued identification, the right of all Texas citizens to choose their representatives might be seriously compromised.
Many of the voter ID laws will first be tested in the 2012 presidential election. For now, no one can say with great certainty how they will affect minority and low-income political participation, and that’s a question that deserves further study.
New York University’s distinctly liberal Brennan Center for Justice recently issued a report claiming that 11% of voting-age citizens who live in the states that have passed voter ID laws currently lack valid identification credentials. The Brennan Center also marshals evidence that getting IDs could be difficult for these mostly poor, mostly minority and often elderly citizens. But how many of those who lack an ID actually voted in the past?
Over the last four presidential elections, nearly 40% of American citizens eligible to cast a ballot did not bother to do so. It is reasonable to surmise that a high proportion of the people who had not taken the trouble to get a government-issued photo ID may be among that huge group of no-shows. If they weren’t going to vote anyway, new ID laws wouldn’t affect their behavior.
In the case of Indiana, whose voter ID law was in effect for the 2008 presidential election, there is some data about participation. That was a very good year for Democrats in general, but Democratic turnout rose more in Indiana, with its ID law in force, than in any other state. Georgia, which also had a new voter ID law in place that year for the first time, also had a huge jump in turnout, almost all of it from Democratic voters.
There are better and worse ID laws, and it seems obvious that the requisite proof of identity should not be needlessly burdensome to get; the process should be made as convenient as possible. The Texas Department of Public Safety, for example, provides free election identification cards to citizens who request them. Every state should make acquiring an ID equally easy.
President Ben Jealous of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People has blasted voter ID laws and called for a “high tide of registration and mobilization and motivation and protection.” If, indeed, the voter ID laws inspire drives to register citizens and get them to the polls (and get them photo IDs), won’t America be better off? More people will gain the freedom to watch an argument in a court of law, board a train or a plane, and even buy a bottle of Scotch. Democracy will have been enhanced. Sensible civil rights advocates might consider that, and join the drive for ID laws.
