Voter ID Laws Research Articles

Correction to: Voter ID Laws and Voter Turnout

The name of the third author was incorrect in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.

Voter ID Laws and Voter Turnout

In recent years, many states have enacted laws imposing strict identification requirements for voting. Proponents contend such laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud while opponents claim the laws disenfranchise legitimate voters, particularly black and Hispanic voters. This paper uses data from 2000 to 2014 federal elections to examine whether these new identification laws reduce voter turnout, either overall or among minority groups. The results provide no evidence that strict identification laws affect overall turnout or black turnout. However, the results do indicate a small reduction in Hispanic turnout, but this effect is statistically significant only if state fixed effects are not included in the estimation.

Secure Online Voting System Using Blockchain

ONLINE VOTING SYSTEM is an online voting technique. In this system people who has right to vote in any place and whose age is above 18 years of any gender can cast his her vote online without going to any physical polling station. The main goal of voting is to come up with leaders of the people's choice. Elections in democratic countries have many issues affecting the fairness of election results. Firstly, some people do not care to vote for a variety of reasons, including lack of faith in the system and believing that the effort is not worth it. Secondly, troublesome voter-ID laws prevent citizens from voting if their ID fails to meet the requirements at the polling booth. Thirdly, voter fraud exists, where dishonest voters manage to vote multiple times for the same candidate, skewing the results. Fourthly, voting machines could be outdated and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Lastly, long voting lines at polling booths can discourage people from voting. Recently, much discussion and controversy arose on the missing votes of citizens in elections. Conducting elections through a DApp on the Ethereum platform can provide transparency, security and credibility to the process. This would prevent voter fraud as one voter can only have one ID and all polling systems are on the blockchain, which can identify duplicate attempts to vote . Governments can also save the logistics costs of holding physical polling booths and counting votes.

We All Agree: Strict Voter ID Laws Disproportionately Burden Minorities

Voter ID laws determine who can and who cannot vote. Given the recent propagation of these laws by Republican legislatures, efforts by the Trump administration and other state legislatures to expan...

Disagreement over ID Requirements and Minority Voter Turnout

I address the debate in this journal about the effects of strict voter ID laws on voter turnout rates of whites and minorities. Although some noteworthy disagreements remain, the exchange has nonetheless resulted in methodological advancements and agreement among the authors on some of the substantive findings. After focusing the discussion on key areas of remaining disagreement, I discuss several ongoing concerns. Specifically, the authors do not actually estimate key quantities of interest, the analyses uncritically combine different kinds of elections where ID laws are likely to have different effects, and no reasonable theory exists to explain why ID laws would increase overall voter turnout beyond the short term.

Re-examining of Indiana's Voter ID Law in Light of Recent Federal Court Cases

Re-examining of Indiana's Voter ID Law in Light of Recent Federal Court Cases

To recognize the tyranny of distance: A spatial reading of Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt

Distance—physical, material distance—is an obviously spatial concept, but one rarely engaged by legal or feminist geographers. We take up this oversight in relation to the 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which adjudicated the constitutionality of a Texas law that imposed new regulations on abortion providers. Because half of the state’s abortion providers were unable to meet these regulations and thus closed, the distance that many Texas women had to travel for abortion services increased dramatically. In part because of these increases, the Supreme Court ultimately determined that the Texas laws imposed an unconstitutional “undue burden.” Bringing together case law and ethnographic data, this article traces the process by which distance is made legally “legible” in the context of reproductive injustice. In so doing, it confronts more uneasy realities of distance, including the discursive dismissal of social and literal immobility and isolation; contradictory readings of “emptiness”; and the material spatiality of distance through the nonplace-ness of rural areas. Together, these factors illuminate a more significant distance, namely the epistemic and social distance that exists between the legal performance of distance in litigation and the embodied traversal of distance by a woman seeking an abortion in Texas. Prioritizing rural distance as material, legal and gendered, our work engages and augments the nascent field of feminist legal geographies. It likewise challenges legal geographers’ insistence on urban space by uncovering the ways in which even the relative “emptiness” of distance is intimately consequential. Finally, this paper makes connections between the exercise of the abortion right and the exercise of other rights that implicate distance, most notably the right to vote. Just as abortion regulations have often had the effect of requiring women to travel farther for abortion services, voter ID laws have the effect of requiring voters to travel to a public agency in order to secure the requisite identity document. Other voting regulations and state and local voting practices may similarly impose spatial burdens on voters. We thus assert that what Whole Woman’s Health reveals about making distance legally cognizable finds ready legal application in other contexts.

Accumulating Evidence of the Impact of Voter ID Laws: Student Engagement in the Political Process

ABSTRACTRecently, voter ID laws have been instituted, modified, or overturned in many states in the U.S. As these laws change, it is important to have accurate measures of their impact. We present the data collection methods and results of class projects that attempted to quantify the impact of the voter ID laws in areas of three states. We also summarize the types of data used to assess the impact of voter ID laws and discuss how our data address some of the shortcomings of the usual techniques for assessing the impact of voter ID laws.

Echoes of Slavery II: How Slavery's Legacy Distorts Democracy

We continue to pay a heavy price for our history in slavery. It is no exaggeration to say that the legacies of slavery determined the outcome of the most recent presidential election. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2.8 million votes. As a matter of democracy, and according to the will of the voters, he lost the election. Yet as a matter of constitutional law and state electoral-vote allocations, Trump received a substantial majority of the votes in the electoral college and won the presidency. In addition, millions of otherwise eligible voters were denied the right to vote through calculated voter suppression efforts and felon disenfranchisement. For a few days after the election, there was a brief flicker of interest in the electoral college and its origins in slavery. Now, several months since the election, this interest has waned and there is little reckoning with the reason why we have such undemocratic elections. Donald Trump won the presidency because of two artifacts of slavery: the electoral college and our post-Reconstruction legacy of state voter suppression and disenfranchisement efforts. The electoral college was created in the Constitution to protect the interests of slave owners. And current voter suppression efforts are a direct legacy of white efforts to prevent blacks from voting after the 15th Amendment prohibited race discrimination in voting. Our failure to know and appreciate the depth of the legacies of slavery leaves us entirely unprepared to understand why presidential elections come out the way they do. In addition, the lack of historical perspective leads us to accept that certain aspects of elections, like state control over voting qualifications and felon disenfranchisement, are somehow neutral and benign doctrines. State voter-suppression efforts enjoy a surface plausibility they do not deserve. This essay describes the principal legacies of slavery in our electoral law and their major effects on the most recent presidential election. First I discuss why the Constitution itself is properly considered a proslavery document. One of the proslavery features of the Constitution is the electoral college, enacted as a way to protect the interests of slave owners. Next I discuss two aspects of state control over voter qualifications that had a major restrictive impact on the electorate: ostensibly neutral efforts like voter ID laws and felon disenfranchisement laws.

To Recognize the Tyranny of Distance: A Spatial Reading of Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt

Distance — physical, material distance — is an obviously spatial concept, but one rarely engaged by legal or feminist geographers. We take up this oversight in relation to the 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which adjudicated the constitutionality of a Texas law that imposed new regulations on abortion providers. Because half of the state’s abortion providers were unable to meet these regulations and thus closed, the distance that many Texas women had to travel for abortion services increased dramatically. In part because of these increases, the Supreme Court ultimately determined that the Texas laws imposed an unconstitutional “undue burden.” Bringing together case law and ethnographic data, this paper traces the process by which distance is made legally “legible” in the context of reproductive in/justice. In so doing, it confronts more uneasy realities of distance, including the discursive dismissal of social and literal im/mobility and isolation; contradictory readings of “emptiness”; and the material spatiality of distance through the non/place-ness of rural areas. Together, these factors illuminate a more significant distance, namely the epistemic and social distance that exists between the legal performance of distance in litigation and the embodied traversal of distance by a woman seeking an abortion in Texas. Prioritizing rural distance as material, legal and gendered, this work engages and augments the nascent field of feminist legal geographies. It likewise challenges legal geographers’ insistence on urban space by uncovering the ways in which even the relative “emptiness” of distance is intimately consequential. Finally, this paper makes connections between the exercise of the abortion right and the exercise of other rights that implicate distance, most notably the right to vote. Just as abortion regulations have often had the effect of requiring women to travel farther for abortion services, voter ID laws have the effect of requiring voters to travel to a public agency in order to secure the requisite identity document. Other voting regulations and state and local voting practices may similarly impose spatial burdens on voters. We thus assert that what Whole Woman’s Health reveals about making distance legally cognizable finds ready legal application in other contexts.

Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes

The proliferation of increasingly strict voter identification laws around the country has raised concerns about voter suppression. Although there are many reasons to suspect that these laws could harm groups like racial minorities and the poor, existing studies have been limited, with most occurring before states enacted strict identification requirements, and they have uncovered few effects. By using validated voting data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study for several recent elections, we are able to offer a more definitive test. The analysis shows that strict identification laws have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of racial and ethnic minorities in primaries and general elections. We also find that voter ID laws skew democracy toward those on the political right.

Voting But for the Law: Evidence from Virginia on Photo Identification Requirements

One contentious question in contemporary election administration is the impact of voter identification requirements. We study a Virginia law that allows us to isolate the impact of requiring voters to show photo identification. Using novel, precinct‐level data, we find that the percentage of registered voters without a driver's license and over age 85 are both positively associated with the number of provisional ballots cast due to a lack of a photo ID. To examine the law's impact on turnout, we associate precinct‐level demographics with the change in turnout between the 2013 gubernatorial and 2014 midterm elections. All else equal, turnout was higher in places where more active registered voters lacked a driver's license. This unexpected relationship might be explained by a targeted Department of Elections mailing, suggesting that the initial impact of voter ID laws may hinge on efforts to notify voters likely to be affected.

“Don't Let the Illegals Vote!”: The Myths of Illegal Latino Voters and Voter Fraud in Contested Local Immigrant Integration

This paper analyzes how the belief and fear by mostly older, white voters, politicians, and poll workers that “illegal” Latino immigrants were seeking to vote in local elections led to stigmatization of and discrimination against some Latino citizen voters in Port Chester, New York. Stoked by and closely echoing national voter ID law rhetoric, this fear fueled an “illegal Latino voter threat” narrative. This article documents how Port Chester’s leaders and citizens repeated this narrative in public life, sometimes enacting it in politics, including in voting. The resultant stigma denies Latino voters the presumed legitimacy other citizens enjoy, discrediting them in one word: illegal. Such processes harm democracy in Port Chester and America, and were on display in the 2016 presidential election.

State and Local Officials and Voter ID

The fight over voter identification (voter ID) remains white hot. States continue to pass voter ID laws; litigation regarding the constitutionality and legality of those laws rages. However, the focus on the legality of voter ID laws can lead to insufficient attention being paid to the role state and local officials and poll workers play in enforcing those laws. Whether a voter can cast a ballot and have her vote counted may depend on a state or local official's interpretation of a voter ID law. Voter ID laws tend to address one question—is the putative voter the person listed in the pollbook?—by asking a different question—has the putative voter produced acceptable identification? Structuring the inquiry that way is problematic because it may lead to disfranchising people who should be allowed to vote but do not have proper identification. As importantly, the answer to the second question depends on how forms of identification are defined and how a poll worker decides whether the putative voter's identification is acceptable. When voter ID laws are clear and easily interpreted, state and local officials need not use much judgment in defining what forms of identification are acceptable, and poll workers need not use much judgment in determining if a putative voter's identification is acceptable. When a voter ID law is unclear, however, state and local officials and poll workers may need to exercise discretion to decide whether a voter may vote, which may allow poll workers to favor some voters and disfavor others. A statute's clarity may also affect how quickly poll workers can decide whether a voter's identification is proper and how quickly poll workers can resolve disputes regarding whether to accept a voter's proffered identification. That may affect how long polling lines stretch and how long voters must wait to vote on Election Day, both issues of democratic concern. Virginia's voter photo ID law provides an opportunity to explore these issues.

How Eighteen-Year-Olds Got the Vote

Recent legal challenges to state voter ID laws have raised pressing questions about the correct interpretation of the constitutional amendment that guarantees eighteen-year-olds the right to vote. The Twenty-sixth Amendment, which was ratified in 1971, lowered the minimum voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. This Article offers a new, urgently needed comprehensive political history of the amendment's origins. Drawing on exhaustive primary source research, the piece traces the story of eighteen-year-old voting from World War II to the present and demonstrates that the story of eighteen-year-old voting is far more complicated that is commonly thought. This Article argues that the motives and rationales both for and against eighteen-year-old voting shifted over time and were always deeply embedded in their particular historical moments. As such, the history of the Twenty-sixth Amendment poses a challenge to those who would look to original intent to interpret it.

Do Frames Emphasizing Harm to Age and Racial-Ethnic Groups Reduce Support for Voter ID Laws?*

Objectives Research suggests that issue frames emphasizing how voter ID laws might harm eligible voters can influence opinions toward the laws. This study examines the effects of frames emphasizing harm to specific groups of eligible voters—namely, elderly, college-aged, African-American, and Hispanic voters—on public support for such laws. Methods We analyze data from question wording experiments included in two state polls. Results We replicate the finding that emphasizing the harmful effects of the laws on eligible voters reduces support. We also find that a frame emphasizing harm to African Americans produces an additional reduction in support. Emphasizing harm to other specific groups (the elderly, college-aged, or Hispanics) does not produce discernible effects beyond the general framing effect. Within group analyses by race, age and political predispositions reveal additional patterns of effects. Conclusion The results suggest political communication about specific groups can shift public opinion for voter ID laws.

Fear and Implicit Racism: Whites’ Support for Voter ID laws

Oftentimes, Whites are unaware that they may have slighted Blacks. Although researchers have spent a considerable amount of attention disentangling this form of implicit (unconscious) racial bias from explicit (conscious) racial bias, we are less clear about the conditions that cause implicit racism to matter in American politics. In this article, we offer a theory of how fear and Whites' unconscious racial bias are tightly linked in memory, and triggering this emotion can make these implicit attitudes more salient in public opinion. To test our theory, we focus on Whites’ opinions toward voter ID laws. Our expectation is that inducing fear should cause implicit racism to play an important role in Whites’ evaluation of the policy. Using an adult national experiment over two waves, we induced several emotions to elicit fear, anger, or relaxation. The findings show that the fear condition causes Whites high in implicit racism to be more supportive of voter ID laws than similar individuals in the anger and control conditions. On the other hand, fear does not cause Whites high in explicit racism to be more supportive of voter ID laws.

Voter ID Laws: A View from the Public

The proliferation of voter identification laws in the American states has spawned a growing literature examining their effects on participation and the factors conditioning their enactment. In this study we move in a different direction, focusing on public opinion toward these laws. Superficially, it appears that voter ID is a valence issue. Public opinion shows broad support, primarily as a way to safeguard the integrity of the ballot box. We explore this supposed consensus on voter ID, probing the rationales and explanations put forth for requiring strict photo ID. Specifically, we draw upon a battery of questions in the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) to determine the degree to which respondents’ attitudes toward voter ID laws are influenced by beliefs about the prevalence of voter fraud, knowledge of existing voter ID laws, and opinions regarding the possible intentions and purposes for photo voter ID laws. Our findings make it evident that although large majorities favor strict photo ID laws, the factors associated with support for these laws vary by partisanship. It is not simply that Republicans strongly favor strict photo ID laws and Democrats are split on the matter. Instead, Republican popular support for strict photo ID laws cuts across virtually all demographic groups, while Democratic support is much more likely to vary as a function of factors such as ideology, education, attention to politics, and racial resentment in the case of white respondents. The partisan division in public opinion over voter ID laws strongly suggests an elite-to-mass message transmission reminiscent of the broader state of polarized party politics.

Video Verification: An Alternative form of Identify Verification

Voting in the United States is a constitutional right, allowing citizens to voice concerns involving policies and laws. It is an essential civil liberty, in which the modification of voter laws can affect over 206 million eligible voters. Since 2008, more than half of the States in the U.S.A. have or are in the process of implementing voter ID laws. These laws have introduced many problems associated with identification credentials, including non-photo voter IDs and photo IDs that are required to vote. If all these new laws are passed, it is predicted that millions of Americans will be disenfranchised, making it more difficult for eligible voters to cast ballots. This paper introduces an identity verification method called video verification (vSquared). vSquared is a tool that uses a video of a person stating their name and address to verify identify claims. In this experiment, the identity verification methods included the use of a person presenting a voter ID card (without photo), a photo ID card, and using vSquared. Each of these three methods had a real condition where the person and matching ID were all legitimate and also a fraudulent condition where impersonation was involved. Each participant had to verify the identity of three different individuals, where some of the individuals represented real conditions while others were impersonating someone else. Participants in the study played the role analogous to a poll worker and had to say if they thought the condition was real or fraudulent. This is similar to the scenario where a poll worker would have to verify an individual's identity prior to voting in an election. The experiment aimed to identify the major differences in recognition rates, if any, for the current verification methods (voter ID and photo ID) against each other and also vSquared. Based on this research, vSquared detected fraud at least 70% more accurately than a non-photo voter ID or photo ID. Although, both the photo ID and vSquared identifying methods were proficient when identifying conditions that were considered to be legitimate IDs, 72% of participants preferred vSquared as a more accurate method for identity verification.

What Do I Need to Vote? Bureaucratic Discretion and Discrimination by Local Election Officials

Do street-level bureaucrats discriminate in the services they provide to constituents? We use a field experiment to measure differential information provision about voting by local election administrators in the United States. We contact over 7,000 election officials in 48 states who are responsible for providing information to voters and implementing voter ID laws. We find that officials provide different information to potential voters of different putative ethnicities. Emails sent from Latino aliases are significantly less likely to receive any response from local election officials than non-Latino white aliases and receive responses of lower quality. This raises concerns about the effect of voter ID laws on access to the franchise and about bias in the provision of services by local bureaucrats more generally.