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
Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?
Next Up In Politics & Policy

Content: Still, those few voters who may be denied the right to vote are more likely to be minorities and Democrats, based on previous studies on voting data. That’s a problem, but apparently not one that impacts most elections — given that other research, like Cantoni and Pons’s study or Highton’s review, suggests the overall impact of voter ID laws on voter turnout is small to nonexistent. That doesn’t make voter ID laws okay — far from it
One reaction to this evidence is that it may justify voter ID laws. After all, if they don’t significantly reduce voter turnout, then what’s the harm if they can help combat voter fraud? But as Cantoni and Pons noted in their study, the evidence suggests that voter ID laws have no significant effect on perceived or actual voter fraud. That shouldn’t be surprising, because voter fraud is already incredibly uncommon in the US, especially the kind of fraud — voter impersonation — that ID requirements target. Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt studied voter impersonation. He found 35 total credible accusations between 2000 and 2014, constituting a few hundred ballots at most. During this 15-year period, more than 800 million ballots were cast in national general elections and hundreds of millions more were cast in primary, municipal, special, and other elections. How much in-person voter fraud was there between 2000