A disproportionate burden: strict voter identification laws and minority turnout

ABSTRACT

Critics of the recent proliferation of strict photo identification laws claim these laws impose a disproportionate burden on racial minorities. Yet, empirical studies of the impact of these laws on minority turnout have reached decidedly mixed results. State and federal courts have responded by offering mixed opinions about the legality of these laws. We offer a more rigorous test of these laws by focusing on more recent elections, by relying on official turnout data rather than surveys, and by employing a more sophisticated research design that assesses change over time using a difference-in-difference approach. Our analysis uses aggregate county turnout data from 2012 to 2016 and finds that the gap in turnout between more racially diverse and less racially diverse counties grew more in states enacting new strict photo ID laws than it did elsewhere. This analysis provides additional empirical evidence that strict voter ID laws appear to discriminate.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• American politics
• voter identification
• turnout

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank the Russell Sage Foundation and Robert Lawson for their generous support of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Zoltan Hajnal worked as an expert witness for the NAACP in Greater Birmingham Ministries, et al. vs John. H. Merrill (a strict voter identification case in Alabama).

Notes

1 For a review of active voter identification cases see: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/state-voting-rights-litigation-july-2019.

2 For example, Crawford vs Marion County Election Board (2008).

3 For example, United States Courts of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit No. 16-1468 (2016).

4 Coding for strict ID laws is based on the National Conference of State Legislators (2019) except for Alabama which is coded as a strict ID state because the only alternative to presenting an ID in that state is to have two election officials sign a sworn statement saying that they know the voter.

5 Data for the count- level vote totals are from the Atlas of US Elections and the Congressional Quarterly Voting and Election website.

6 To address migration into or out of the county, we also control for change in the county voting age population.

7 Only eight states (AL, GA, FL, LA, NC, PN, SC, and TN) ask for race/ethnicity when citizens register to vote.

8 Regressions include standard errors clustered at the state level and are weighted by county population size.

9 For this comparison, we drop states that already have strict ID laws. If we include states that implemented strict photo ID laws before 2012, the pattern is similar.

Additional information

Funding

The authors wish to thank the Russell Sage Foundation and Robert Lawson for their generous support of this research.