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
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Credible allegations of in-person voter impersonation versus total ballots cast in national general elections
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Content: The researchers caution that their findings are not meant to be the final word. It’s possible that the results could be flawed — maybe the data sets for voter turnout are less complete than they believed, or the type of analysis they took on for this study isn’t the right model. The voter fraud databases in particular are, by their own admission, not comprehensive. Or maybe voter ID laws do have some effect, but the model the researchers used couldn’t detect it because it was just too small. This is also a working paper, so it’s likely to be reevaluated as it goes through a review process. Still, there’s other research to suggest that voter ID laws don’t have as much of an effect as people on both sides of the debate suggest. Other research suggests voter ID laws have limited to no effect
It’s good to be skeptical of single studies with surprising findings, but previous reviews of the research on voter ID laws are in line with what Cantoni and Pons’s study found. In 2017, Benjamin Highton, a political scientist at UC Davis, conducted the most thorough review of the research yet on voter ID laws. He tried to filter out the studies with weaker methodologies, putting more emphasis on those that were more rigorous. His conclusion: