Here & Now

Voter ID Law Depressed Turnout, Survey Finds

Frederica Freyberg:

A first look tonight at a study of Wisconsin voters sparking national attention. UW-Madison Political Science Professor Ken Mayer surveyed Dane and Milwaukee County registered voters who did not vote in the 2016 presidential election, finding that Wisconsin's voter ID law discouraged thousands of voters. According to the survey, commissioned by the Dane County Clerk, 11.2% of eligible nonvoting registrants were deterred from voting which according to the study results, corresponds to well over 16,000 people and could be more than 23,000 people, depending on the survey’s margin of error. The survey also found that a disproportionate number of people who did not cast ballots citing the voter ID law were low-income and minority voters. Just more 21% of low-income voters were deterred from voting, compared to just over 7% of higher earners. While 8.3% of white voters were deterred by the ID law, 27.5% of African Americans were deterred from voting. We caught up with the study’s author, Professor Ken Mayer upon its release this week. We started by asking about the survey’s conclusions.

Ken Mayer:

What we concluded is that the voter ID law had a substantial effect on a number of voters. I think it’s really one of the first studies that has demonstrated that there were thousands of people whose right to vote was interfered with. We call it deterred. Or in some cases I think we can state that people were effectively prevented from casting a ballot because of the ID requirements.

Frederica Freyberg:

Who, according to your results, was most likely to be deterred from voting?

Ken Mayer:

Well, there’s — past research has demonstrated that there are vulnerable populations: low-income, minority, poor. These are the types of individuals who are most likely to be affected because they’re least likely to possess the forms of ID and our findings were consistent with that. We found that African-Americans were over three times as likely to report that they had either been deterred in voting or prevented from voting. And you see a similar difference when we’re looking at low-income individuals, where actually about six times as likely to say that they were affected by this than high-income individuals. Again, this is consistent with other research that looks at patterns of ID possessions and where the burdens of these laws tend to fall.

Frederica Freyberg:

Given those demographics, is it your professional opinion that this is in fact the purpose of Wisconsin's voter ID law and others across the country?

Ken Mayer g:

Well, we’ve been very careful in presenting the studies not to make those conclusions. This was a specific empirical question. We were interested in how many people were affected and what their demographic characteristics are. So I'm not going to make a claim about motivation. Our intention was to present the empirical findings and contribute to the debate over the nature of these laws.

Frederica Freyberg:

Such laws are supposed to address voter fraud, though. Is that right?

Ken Mayer:

That's correct.

Frederica Freyberg:

And in your mind, do they?

Ken Mayer:

No. The research is absolutely conclusive. The forms of voter fraud that these laws can address, which is really nothing other than voter impersonation. Someone showing up at the polling place and claiming to be someone else on the rolls and voting in that person’s place. Study after study after study, anybody, any neutral or informed person, scholar, academic, student who has looked at this has concluded that that kind of fraud is just vanishingly rare. We’re talking about maybe one or two cases in an election. Justin Levitt who’s a law professor at Loyola University in Los Angeles looked at credible cases of voter impersonation over a 18-year period and found out of more than a billion votes cast, there were maybe 30, 31 cases. So the notion that these laws actually address a form of voter fraud is just simply incorrect. And so here, again, we make an empirical statement that we have good evidence that thousands of people were essentially prevented from voting by these laws. Balancing against that that there are no cases of voter impersonation that these laws can address.

Frederica Freyberg:

As to what your survey found, you discovered that people who actually had qualifying ID to vote didn’t because they were confused about the law.

Ken Mayer:

That's correct. Most of the people who cited ID as a reason they didn’t vote actually turned out to possess a qualifying form of ID. And that’s actually consistent with other similar studies that have concluded the same thing. One of the most common misconceptions is that people believe that their driver’s license or photo ID has to have their current address or the same address that they registered under. And that’s not true. It doesn’t have to. And that kind of confusion contributes to disenfranchisement because people don’t quite understand what the law means and how it works. And so they wind up thinking that they’re ineligible to vote when they actually are.

Frederica Freyberg:

Why did the Dane County Clerk commission this survey?

Ken Mayer:

So, his goal, as he explained it to me, is that he wanted to find evidence of what the effect was and how he might best deploy his resources to educate people on the nature of the law. It was basically to identify the empirical question, how many people were affected and is there anything that he might be able to do to educate people about the law.

Frederica Freyberg:

Now, your survey shows that the number of voters deterred from casting a ballot would not have been enough to change election results. So why is this information important?

Ken Mayer:

Well, again, we are also very clear not to make the claim that the numbers that we found would have flipped the election or that the numbers that we find in Dane and Milwaukee County can be immediately extrapolated to the state. In my view, the harm here is not simply whether the election would have changed. That’s the wrong metric. When you have thousands of people who are effectively disenfranchised, unable to vote — and I should point out that about 80% of the people that we identified as being affected by this, the voter files show that they actually voted in 2012. That’s a serious harm. Disenfranchising people for no reason is in itself a harm to the integrity of the electoral process.

Frederica Freyberg:

Ken Mayer, thanks very much.

Ken Mayer:

My pleasure.

Frederica Freyberg:

In reaction to Mayer’s voter ID study, the state treasurer said Dane County should have its shared revenue reduced by $55,000, calling that amount for its commission of the survey a “complete waste of money.”