Title: Study: voter ID laws don’t reduce voter fraud — or voter turnout - Vox
Headings: A new study finds voter ID laws don’t reduce voter fraud — or voter turnout
A new study finds voter ID laws don’t reduce voter fraud — or voter turnout
The laws don’t seem to do what critics fear or proponents hope.
What the latest study found
Other research suggests voter ID laws have limited to no effect
That doesn’t make voter ID laws okay — far from it
How much in-person voter fraud was there between 2000 and 2014?
Credible allegations of in-person voter impersonation versus total ballots cast in national general elections
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Content: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons/NBER
One possibility, the researchers acknowledge, is that voter ID laws do have some effect, but mobilization efforts against voter ID laws end up canceling it out — since, after all, these measures have become highly contentious among Democrats in particular. So the researchers tried to account for that, using data for people’s self-reported contacts from campaigns, donations to candidates, political meeting attendance, use of campaign signs, and campaign volunteering, all of which would suggest voter mobilization. There was no evidence that political mobilization went up significantly after voter ID laws. “We cannot fully reject the possibility that mobilization against the laws alleviated direct negative effects — that would require evidence on additional outcomes such as people’s feelings — yet we do not find any sign of it in available data,” the researchers found. Finally, the researchers turned to voter fraud. For this, they used two databases tracking voter fraud reported by the media and elsewhere — one from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and another from News21, a journalism project that the researchers described as “more liberal.” Their conclusion was straightforward: “ We find no significant effect in either dataset.” They also didn’t find a significant effect on perceptions of voter fraud — measured by how often people think voter fraud occurs and their beliefs that elections were fair. Simply put, voter ID laws seem to have no detectable effect on voter fraud, real or perceived.