Study looks at voter ID impact

Black, young and recently registered voters are more likely to be affected by voter identification laws like North Carolina’s recently enacted legislation, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office study.

The GAO conducted the study after senators, alarmed by the number of states enacting legislation they believe makes it harder for voters to cast ballots, requested it.

North Carolina is included in this category, proposing some of the highest standards for voting in 2016, according to Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina.

“This report is even more proof that these state laws significantly suppress and discourage Americans from exercising their constitutionally protected right to vote,” said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., in a statement. “These new laws will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of elderly, disabled, minority, young, rural and low-income Americans to exercise their most basic right.”

The study compared voting data from 2008 and 2012 in Kansas and Tennessee, where voters are required to show photo ID at polls, to those of a number of other states, where IDs are not required.

While ID requirements vary from state to state, the GAO found that 5 to 16 percent of registered voters lack the proper identification documents required for voting.

The numbers vary by race and ethnicity. The GAO found in one state that while 85 percent of white voters have a valid ID for voting, only 81 percent of black voters do. The study estimated black voters were more impacted by voter ID laws than white, Asian-American and Hispanic voters.

States have enacted restrictive laws because of concern over voter fraud, but there is dispute over the legitimacy of this concern, said Robert Popper, a senior attorney for Judicial Watch.

The GAO claimed few instances of voting fraud but acknowledged that it is a difficult statistic to track because the information is spread across various databases, and federal and state agencies collect different amounts of data on voting fraud.

Still, Popper said the results of the study are tainted because the GAO compared states in which elections varied in significance, thus drawing different amounts of voters.

Then the GAO put Catalist, a progressive organization, in charge of presenting the data, and the group distorted them, Potter said.

“That is a flawed study,” he said. “Both Kansas and Tennessee wrote response letters objecting to all of the problems with those studies. They wrote these letters to the GAO as the study was being conducted, but the GAO went on anyway.”

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