As seen in the New York Times:
States that imposed identification requirements on voters reduced turnout at the polls in the 2004 presidential election by about 3 percent, and by two to three times as much for minorities, new research suggests.[...]
Tim Vercellotti, a professor at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University who helped conduct the study, said that in the states where voters were required to sign their names or present identifying documents like utility bills, blacks were 5.7 percent less likely to vote than in states where voters simply had to say their names.
Dr. Vercellotti said Hispanics appeared to be 10 percent less likely to vote under those requirements, while the combined rate for people of all races was 2.7 percent.
The unanswered question in all this is, of course, why does this occur? Is it a sign of certain groups being less informed about the requirements, or less likely to actually have the required documentation? Could this be a manifestation of slightly different rates in voter registration? Or, could there be some subtle bias in the study not caught by the NYT story?
Stories like this make me wish that privacy issues wouldn’t make a national ID impractical.
1 response so far ↓
1 meep // 22 Feb 2007 at 10:19 am
…or perhaps certain groups are more often used in voting fraud, which is being cut down by these rules?
It might not be by ethnic group, but by location: it’s probably much easier to get away with voting fraud in an urban area, where polling places are closer to each other and there’s so many people that poll workers might not recognize a particular voter voting under a fraudulent name, than in a rural area. So I’d look at geographic effects as well - I bet there’s little impact in rural or sparsely-populated communities, and a much greater impact in large cities.