Last week the U.S. Election Assistance Commission finally got around to officially issuing a report they commissioned that was completed in June 2006, but not formally discussed until the bipartisan panel met in Washington last week. Even more curious is that the report has been online at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics since last Summer. Rutgers professors Timothy Vercellotti and David Anderson presented a paper on the report at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia in early September of 2006, so the data and findings have been widely available for almost a year.
Yet the mainstream media and most of blogdom were silent about the study until the EAC finally got around to officially issuing the report. I must confess, I usually try to keep up on such things but missed it. Even after the delay of almost a year, the Commission’s chairwoman, Donetta Davidson, called the study “premature,” making the obvious point that since 2004 a number of states had adopted voter ID regulations. “You can’t make determinations based on one year,” she said. “We have new states that have ID requirements now that weren’t in that review.” What she didn’t say was that most of these new requirements are even stricter than the ones in the 2004 study.
So what did this report contain that made it a political hot potato and left the two prestigious academic centers who had conducted the study–the Eagleton Institute and Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law–in an extremely awkward position? In a nutshell, the report told the Commission exactly what it didn’t want to hear. It’s main findings confirmed what many had suspected in 2004: requiring voter IDs restrict voter turnout, especially among people of color.
“It validates some of the things that have been said all along about the problems of voter ID,” said Kimball Brace of Election Data Services told USA Today, which broke the story. Taken together with the earlier research by Tova Wang and Job Serebrov that found little evidence of voter fraud at polling places, it shows voter ID laws can have more of a negative than a positive impact, Brace said.
The opening of the paper by professors Vercellotti and Anderson alludes to the critical balancing act between being too lenient about voter registration which, according to some, increases fraud, or to be stricter and decrease turnout. In the first paragraph they write:
Democratic norms regarding ballot access and the legitimacy of elections collide at the polling place on Election Day. A representative democracy ought to make voting accessible to as many qualified citizens as possible. But, at the same time, it is important to prevent vote fraud that could lead to an inaccurate outcome and illegitimate results. Conducting elections, therefore, becomes a balancing act between allowing maximum access to the ballot and preventing fraud in the casting of those ballots.
What the two concluded was that the balancing act had fallen on its face and what I refer to as the level playing field had tilted. The two found that voter turnout in 2004 was about 4% lower in states that required voters to sign their name or produce documentation. But the most dramatic finding was that requiring ID’s had a decidedly negative impact on people of color. Hispanic turnout was 10% lower. For African Americans and Asian-Americans the figure was 6%.
In their conclusion the authors admit that their data did not allow them to examine the crucial why of the results. Why did people turn out in lesser numbers as the requirements stiffened? The paper asks:
If these requirements dampen turnout, is it because individuals are aware of the requirements and stay away from the polls because they cannot or do not want to meet the requirements? Or, do the requirements result in some voters being turned away when they cannot meet the requirements on Election Day?
The final paragraph of the report ends with what on the surface seems an one-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand conclusion that tries to tip toe through the minefield of voting rights and the immediate issue of satisfying the group that had paid for the study. Yet curiously even this rhetoric did not satisfy the Commission:
It appears that stringent requirements can reduce turnout. But it remains to be seen whether the reduction in turnout is the price to pay for greater ballot security. That may, indeed, be the case. But it is also possible that strict voter identification requirements, designed to promote legitimate election results, could actually undermine that legitimacy instead .
Perhaps the reason this language failed to satisfy the Commission lies in the clever rhetorical construction of the paragraph. Reverse the first two and last two sentences and you will see what I mean. By framing the issue as they did these two very clever professors seem to say that in a democracy there can really only be one answer, we must accept some degree of imperfection if that allows more people to participate in the process. Otherwise we are no better than some tin horn dictatorship.
It is too bad the study did not allow the authors to survey people of color or that the Commission could find the courage to conduct a study focusing on why stricter requirements have kept them from voting. Maybe it is because they don’t want to hear the answer. I suspect such a study would show what many people of color already know: some don’t have IDs like driver’s licenses, some don’t have permanent addresses because that’s what life can be like in certain parts of the country, some don’t bother because their usual experiences with government officials have just been too much of a hassle, and frankly, some are intimidated. The higher percentages for Hispanics may also be due to the intimidation over immigration.
The attempt of the Republican Counterrevolution to make it difficult for people of color to vote has been going on for quite some time. Their argument is that making registration easier causes more voting fraud. This is where Wang and Serebrov enter the picture. The EAC hired this bipartisan team to survey studies and reports of voter fraud and intimidation and to make recommendations for further study.
Their report to the EAC makes interesting reading. Their literature review concluded, “there is no consensus on the pervasiveness of voting fraud and voter intimidation.” But they went on to note “one point of agreement is that absentee voting and voter registration by nongovernmental groups create opportunities for fraud.” Interviews with experts largely confirmed this finding that the greatest problem lay with absentee ballots. Their exhaustive review of 40,000 cases related to fraud turned up approximately 180 relevant cases. What they don’t say is that this is less than one percent. According to Wang and Sebrov, “Of those that were applicable, no apparent thematic pattern emerged.”
While the report makes recommendations to the EAC for further study, it also shoots a rather large hole in the Republican contention that voter fraud at the polls is a major problem. At best it is a huge exaggeration, at worst a deliberate attempt to create a problem where none exists. USA Today, in an article on the Wang and Sebrov report stated unequivocably, “At a time when many states are instituting new requirements for voter registration and identification, a preliminary report to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission has found little evidence of the type of polling-place fraud those measures seek to stop.”
So why is the Republican Party working so hard to perpetuate the myth of voter fraud? Because this debate has little to do with potential fraud and everything to do with the fact that the poor, the elderly, and people of color tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic. They also happen to be people who do not have IDs, do not even have ways to get to the polls, and are either suspicious or cynical about government.
It is time to name this for what it is: pure, flat-out racism. The implication that people of color are more likely to “cheat” at the polls evokes some insulting and obnoxious stereotypes that go back more than a century. In the GOP�s attempts to disenfranchise voters of color one can hear echoes of the “shifty negro,”"the lawless bandito,” “the untrustworthy Asian.�”
Neither the paper nor the EAC dared to touch the real bomb hidden behind all those numbers: what impact did they have on the presidential election? Did John Kerry, like Al Gore before him, lose the election because of systematic attempts to keep voters from the polls? Simple math yields a probable answer. The additional 4% cited in the Vercellotti and Anderson paper probably would have put John Kerry in the White House. We cannot say for sure because the data are not broken down by state, so the impact on the electoral vote is speculative.
There are those who feel that compared to the War in Iraq that issues such as election reform have little traction. As I post this, Technorati reports almost 5,000 bloggers babbling on about Iraq. This is the only post on voting rights out of over 300,000 blogs. You may draw your own conclusion about the relative importance of each, but this imbalance leaves me uneasy about the future of our country.
If what I call one of the four cornerstones of Liberal America is crumbling right before our eyes, its implications stretch far beyond the validity of regression analysis or the precise and often indecipherable legal language of election law. In short, had we had fair elections in 2000 and 2004 we might not be in Iraq or debating over troop increases. The thousands who have been killed and wounded might be living normal lives. So when you read about the next helicopter that goes down think about the ballot box and the tilted playing field.
Crossposts: All Things Democrat
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