Project Vote has monitored voter ID legislation since 2007. At the time, there was little information on the impact of voter ID policies, which were rapidly gaining popularity in the state legislatures, and eventually, in the courts. In 2008, Indiana’s voter ID law first raised the questions of voter ID’s impact on voters and the prevalence of voter fraud in elections. While we have known that voter fraud exists at a rate of 31 votes out of 1 billion, we now know that strict voter ID, in fact, has a much greater, disproportionately negative impact on voters of color.
The University of California, San Diego study—which references newer election data to truly assess the impact of newly implemented ID laws—found that strict ID laws could be expected to “depress Latino turnout by 9.3 points, Black turnout by 8.6 points, and Asian American turnout by 12.5 points,” wrote Scott Keyes at ThinkProgress.
“The impact of strict voter ID was also evident in general elections, where minority turnout plummeted in relation to the white vote,” wrote Keyes. The UCSD researchers found that turnout would drop for voters of color in states that required strict ID to vote, going from a predicted gap of 4.9 points in states without strict ID to as much as 13.5 points in states with strict ID.
Keyes adds, “the study found that strict voter ID laws had little impact on younger voters as a whole, while there were ‘small indications’ that poorer Americans were adversely impacted, though likely not to the same degree racial minorities were.”
Since 2010, 21 voter ID laws and other voting restrictions have passed in the states. This trend seemed to escalate in 2013, “when the Supreme Court deemed Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional,” according to New America Media. One of those post-Section 5 laws is North Carolina’s omnibus restrictive voting law, which awaits a federal judge’s decision over whether the state’s voter ID law, among other provisions, should be enforced.
In case we forgot, the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965 to protect the voting rights of all citizens. Section 5 of the VRA required vetting of new voting laws in states or jurisdictions that had a recent history of voter discrimination. When the Supreme Court decided to remove this provision, states like North Carolina and Texas rushed to implement otherwise problematic (and currently challenged) voting laws. Based on the new UCSD study, it appears the rush to put strict voter ID in place was no accident. Strict voter ID laws are undemocratic, and we need to restore the landmark Voting Rights Act so that it serves all eligible citizens, no matter their race, ethnicity, or income.
