The North Carolina State Board of Elections began a hearing this week into alleged ballot tampering in last year’s 9th District congressional race, which ended in a razor-thin, 905-vote win for Republican Mark Harris.
Since the 2016 general elections, accusations (largely unproven) of widespread ballot fraud have erupted and intense focus invested in possible measures to ensure election integrity. States have increasingly enacted voter ID laws as one such deterrent. But we also know that laws aimed at securing the voting process, unless carefully crafted, can scare away citizens from the polls.
Thirty-five states request or require voters to show some form of identification, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The remaining 15 verify voters by other means, such as cross-checking a name with a known street address, but don't require identification.
Voter ID is certainly controversial, but political pundits rarely ask a key question: Do they actually work? A new research paper reaches a surprising conclusion: These rules don't impact voter fraud or public confidence, nor do they dampen registration or turnout. In essence, voter ID laws don't influence elections at all.
We asked the study’s coauthor, Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Vincent Pons, for some insights on the results. Pons has studied voter participation and engagement issues in France, Italy, and Africa. He worked with Enrico Cantoni, from the University of Bologna, on the research, which the authors believe is the first attempt to measure the impact of strict ID laws on voter fraud. Their paper is titled Strict ID Laws Don’t Stop Voters: Evidence from a U.S. Nationwide Panel, 2008–2016.
Sean Silverthorne: You studied elections between 2008-2016, in 11 states, mostly with Republican majorities, that adopted voter ID laws requiring people to show proof of residency before being allowed to register. Did these laws accomplish their goals?
Vincent Pons: Advocates of voter ID laws argue that the goal of these laws was to enhance the integrity of the electoral process. However, the laws did not accomplish this alleged objective. Contrary to the argument used by the Supreme Court in the 2008 case Crawford v. Marion County to uphold the constitutionality of one of the early strict ID laws, we find no significant impact on fraud or public confidence in election integrity. This result weakens the case for adopting such laws in the first place.
Opponents of strict voter ID laws have argued that the laws' real purpose was to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters without ID. In our paper, we test whether these laws decreased participation using a 1.3-billion-observations panel. We find that fears that strict ID requirements would disenfranchise ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged populations have not materialized. We do not find any significant effect of the laws on registration or turnout, overall or for any group of voters defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.
Silverthorne: What’s the message to entities that are considering implementing voter ID requirements?
Vincent Pons: For all the heated debates around strict voter ID laws, our analysis of their effects on participation and fraud obtains mostly null results. Therefore, our results suggest that efforts both to safeguard electoral integrity and enfranchise more voters may be better served through other reforms. Low and unequal participation represent real threats to democracy, but these may be more effectively addressed by reducing other barriers to voting, such as voter registration costs and long travel and waiting time in areas with low polling station density.
Similarly, there is a real need to improve citizens' faith in US elections, but again, this may be more effectively addressed by upgrading outdated voting technology and other improvements in the administration of elections.
Silverthorne: You have studied voter participation and engagement in a number of countries.How does the American voting system(s) compare to those other countries in terms of encouraging turnout and protecting against fraud?
Vincent Pons: Voter turnout in most of the established democracies has been decreasing over the last decades and, in some countries, elections regularly attract less than half of the voting-age population. The lower a democracy’s participation, the more unequal it tends to be, raising concerns for the representativeness of elected officials and public policies, and for the overall legitimacy and stability of democratic regimes.
In the United States, for instance, minorities are much less likely to vote than whites and young people are much less likely to vote than seniors. The trend of declining turnout in the country was halted by the revival of large scale get-out-the-vote campaigns after the early 2000s, but turnout remains low, with fewer than 60 percent of citizens participating in presidential and midterm elections.
Voter registration remains an important obstacle to participation. While in many countries voter registration is automatic, and entirely done by the state, in the US (as well as France and a few other countries) it remains the responsibility of citizens. While the process has recently been simplified, my research and others' suggests that remaining registration obstacles largely discourage turnout.
Sean Silverthorne is editor-in-chief of HBS Working Knowledge.
Image: adamkaz
Related Reading:
Why People Don’t Vote—and How a Good Ground Game Helps
Research Paper: Voter Registration Costs and Disenfranchisement
Ground Game, Air Wars, and Other Marketing Lessons From Presidential Elections
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