Study: Stricter voting ID rules hurt ’04 turnout
A study by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University shows turnout in 2004 was about 4% lower in states that required voters to sign their name or produce documentation. Hispanic turnout was 10% lower; the difference was about 6% for blacks and Asian-Americans.
By a substantial margin, the Indiana residents most likely to possess photo ID turn out to be whites, the middle aged, and high-income voters. And while this is undoubtedly just a wild coincidence, these are also the three groups most like to vote for Republicans. […] Overall, 91% of registered Republicans had photo IDs compared to only 83% of registered Democrats.
But like I said, this is probably just a coincidence. I’m sure Karl Rove and the RNC had no idea that the demographics broke down like this. Right?
From Art Levine, writing in The American Prospect:
But Republicans were not deterred by their loss in civil court and pressed for a criminal investigation, a probe which U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias started on the same day that the court ruled against the GOP. Iglesias was a true believer in the menace of voter fraud. As one of just two U.S. attorneys in the nation to form such task forces, he was invited to lecture other U.S. attorneys in 2005 as part of the annual Justice Department ballot-integrity conference.
Iglesias’ efforts weren’t enough for Patrick Rogers, the Republican National Lawyers Association point person in the state, who mounted a campaign to pressure Iglesias to bring criminal charges before the election, rather than form a task force. Indeed, even before Iglesias concluded in 2006 that there wasn’t enough evidence to indict on voter fraud, major Republicans in the state had started asking the Bush administration for his removal. In early December 2006, Iglesias was one of seven U.S. attorneys whom the Justice Department fired.
Today, Iglesias says of voter fraud: “It’s like the boogeymen parents use to scare their children. It’s very frightening, and it doesn’t exist.”
From Art Levine (again), this time in The Huffington Post:
“Black voters in Dallas, Texas in 2006, after Mr. Agerwal joined the Justice Department, received a letter that said if you were registered by ACORN, they’re a fraudulent organization, and if you try to vote, you’ll be prosecuted and arrested at the polls.” He testified that he had alerted the Justice Department, but no action was taken. Project Vote, ACORN’s partner in managing voting registration drives, also contacted the Dallas FBI, which declined to investigate the intimidating mailers sent to thousands of African-Americans.
The FBI belatedly responded to Project Vote in late December 2006, asserting that “no factual predication of voter intimidation was established.” The FBI’s decision not to investigate, critics say, is the latest sign that politicization appears to have compromised the nominally non-partisan law enforcement agency.
Moreover, the Justice Department’s response was part of a striking pattern of indifference to alleged intimidation violations. In fact, The Huffington Post has learned, President Bush’s Justice Department hasn’t brought a single prosecution or lawsuit in more than seven years on behalf of any African-American voters who faced direct voter intimidation threats and challenges…
[…]such threatening incidents include black-shirted, gun-toting thugs thwarting Latino voters in Tucson, Arizona in 2006, and fliers from a fake “Milwaukee Black Voters League” distributed during the 2004 election in Milwaukee inner-city neighborhoods warning people that if anyone in their family had been convicted of a crime, “you can get ten years in prison” if you dared to vote. Unfortunately, such cases don’t seem to have been deemed worthy of serious investigation by DOJ, and certainly no prosecutions or lawsuits have resulted.
With US economies elections often quite close, the 2-4% gain that Republicans gain in elections because they’re led by cheating, lying racists actually does make a real difference. And the system is self-perpetuating; the more racist Republicans are in charge, the more racist Republicans are appointed to positions from which they can make sure that crimes against non-white voters are ignored.
For regular coverage of voting rights and voting access issues, check out the Voting Matters Blog.
It’s also the Repugnicans war on the poor and the elderly. Their goal is to disenfranchise anyone and everyone who isn’t lily white country club material.
If we could get some Democrats elected who had actual spines, it might be possible to undo some of the damage done in the past 7+ years, but I’m not optimistic. The Dept of Justice needs a thorough housecleaning, as does the federal judiciary. There are a lot of judges who should be impeached (starting with Scalia and Thomas and working down, but I doubt if it’s ever going to happen.
Elections, not economies.
With US economies often quite close
My guess is that you meant “With US elections quite close ….”
A study by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University shows turnout in 2004 was about 4% lower in states that required voters to sign their name or produce documentation.
Which is just what you would expect if there’s a significant number of people who had previously voted fraudulently.
It appears that Hispanics were disproportionately affected; but then, one might expect that there are a disproportionate number of Hispanics in the U.S. who are ineligible to vote due to their status as illegal aliens, as compared to other ethnic/racial groups. People who have legally immigrated into the U.S. have better documentation than most of us and can lay their hands on it a lot more readily.
… in states that required voters to sign their name or produce documentation.
Why would there be a reduction in voting by certain groups of people who are otherwise eligible to vote simply because they were required to sign their names? I’d like to see these two classes of states (those that required people to sign their names and those that required people to come up with documentation) separated and see the stats for each.
I’d also like to see more details on what kind of documentation people are required to produce in those cases where they are. I’ll go along with the concept that this kind of requirement can be made unnecessarily onerous, but I also hold that it doesn’t have to be, and that it’s not unreasonable to require people to prove they are eligible to vote at some point along the line before they actually do so.
Nan said:
There are a lot of judges who should be impeached (starting with Scalia and Thomas and working down,
I can certainly understand that you disagree with rulings and opinions from Scalia and Thomas, but what you think they have done that rises to the level of an impeachable offense?
It seems to me that more study is needed here. New requirements for proof of eligibility for voting were enacted; turnout dropped. Certain ethnic/racial groups’ participation dropped more than average. Up to this point people have guessed about the reasons why this kind of thing might happen, but now we should be able to get real data as to why it actually did happen, and from that determine what measures can be taken to ameliorate the situation.
That’s the genius of the Federal system of government with limited State sovereignty. Different states can try different ways of solving a problem, and all can learn and select the best way.
It would also be interesting to see which groups were disproportionately less affected. Were there groups that were predicted to be disproportionately affected that in fact were not? I note, BTW, that only two racial groups (one of which does not have the reputation for being poorer than average) and one ethnic group are quoted as being affected. What other groups are affected? Is there any breakdown regarding sex or age? It was predicted that this would disproportionately affect the elderly. Did it actually do so?
From the first link:
So why did this happen if Photo ID voting laws are bound to depress turnout?
There’s been quite an impressive history of disenfranchising men and women of color in terms of voting in this country. I can’t believe that anyone can really be amazed that it’s not continuing or efforts aren’t being made to continue it today. And I don’t think it’s just Republicans either.
Seven years ago, when members of Congress asked the Senate not to certify the 2000 election results because they had serious concerns about what happened in Florida, the Democrats ignored them. Sometimes I think they lay awake at night sweating for failing to be anything greater than Republican lite. One can hope anyway.
It’s my hopes that major organizations like NOW and FM are out monitoring this issue along with others like the ACLU and PFAW, because after all, there’s a hell of a lot of women disenfranchised here as well.
In my state, it’s against policy to even ask let alone require photo ID, but I’m sure efforts to change that to impact the Latino voters especially will eventually succeed.
My questions would be more along the lines of whether or not there were changes including increases in participation turnout among different racial groups in Indiana? How were each impacted in terms of increases/decreases? Was enforcement of the policy uniform? Were any other factors apparent like voter registration drives, particularly popular items on the ballot and other factors outside the new law.
Also, if one of these factors or more came to play, perhaps without the new law, participation might have been even higher than a 2% increase.
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All fair questions, Radfem. They should be asked of the other states as well, however. Consider that the lack of controversial referenda or something equivalent in this last election compared to previous elections might well have been a factor in those states having lower participation. It’s very well put to note that in none of these states do we likely have an isolated case where the only factor that changed from one election to another is a voter ID law.
Aside from the overall intent of this mailing (which I think definitely deserves the FBI’s attention), I’m a little curious as to how the group that sent it out was able to target black voters specifically. Did they just send it out in particular neighborhoods regardless of the actual race or voter registration status of the residents, or were they specifically sent to black voters? If the latter, where’d they get that info?
It sounds similar to tactics used by a congressman in Orange County when his office sent a mailer out targeting Latino voters under the guise that it was illegal to vote if you’re undocumented. Even if I weren’t and was a legally registered voter, that might give me pause given the history of voter intimidation in O.C. especially in connection to former congressman, Dornan including the staffing of security guards at polling sites in predominantly Latino precincts.
Surnames might have been part of it in this case. I’m not sure if there’s a database where race is mentioned and whether or not that is the case might also depend on state laws and practices.
It could be neighborhoods (or zip codes) particularly in cities which were pretty racially segregated. I could think of a neighboring city where if they simply had sent a mailer like that (whoever was responsible) to one neighborhood, that would involve a lot of Black voters. The irony is that this city is often referred to as being one of the greater if not the most integrated city in the country.
I’ve heard Chicago referred to as being not a melting pot but a bag of marbles; some white, some black, some yellow, some brown, etc. Sure, there’s a mix in the bag as a whole – the city LOOKS integrated on paper, but the contents within each marble are uniform and the marbles don’t mix their contents.
I ask about the method used because I work for a company that provides data products and services using (in part) publicly available data sources. I had this vision that there was a publicly available voter data base somewhere that included the race/ethnicity of individual voters. I couldn’t imagine that such would actually exist.
The Supremes have upheld the Indiana Voter ID law.
From the AP story:
We’ll see, now, if other states adopt such laws. I doubt if they will in Illinois. Not that there haven’t been elections in Chicago that have had rampant voter fraud, but it’s generally operated in the interests – indeed, at the behest – of the ruling elite (a.k.a. the Combine).
Here’s the opinions.