More Vindication for Voter ID A new study finds no partisan effect, but will Democrats believe it?
This ought to be old news, but someone please inform President Biden and the Democratic Party that another academic study has found voter-ID laws don’t have real partisan consequences. How long until this is conventional wisdom? A 2021 study detected “no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.”
The new analysis, posted Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comes at the question from a slightly different angle. “Existing research focuses on how voter ID laws affect voter turnout and fraud,” write the two authors, who are political scientists at Notre Dame. “But the extent to which they produce observable electoral benefits for Republican candidates and/or penalize Democrats remains an open question.”
So what’s the answer, after examining state and federal elections from 2003 to 2020? “The first laws implemented produced a Democratic advantage, which weakened to near zero after 2012,” the study says. “We conclude that voter ID requirements motivate and mobilize supporters of both parties, ultimately mitigating their anticipated effects on election results.” The lack of suppressive outcome explains why requiring photo ID to vote is “favored by 77% of people of color and 80% of White adults,” to quote Gallup’s poll last year.
For that matter, have a gander at the University of Georgia’s 2022 postelection survey. Asked to rate their personal experience voting in the Peach State, 72.6% of black residents said excellent, 23.6% said good, 3.3% said fair, and 0% said poor. The figures for whites were 72.7% excellent, 23.3% good, 3% fair and 0.9% poor. Those who had a “self-reported problem with voting” included 0.5% of blacks and 1.3% of whites.
Also, 42.2% of overall respondents said Georgia’s new voting law increased their confidence in the election system, compared with 24.6% who said the reverse. Those results were polarized by party and race, but that’s not surprising after Mr. Biden flew down to slander the effort as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Several years ago he called voter-ID laws a scheme “to repress minority voting.” Trust the science, Democrats say, but apparently not political science.
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