The claim by advocates of voter identification laws is that the requirement is put in place to prevent voter fraud. The question is whether it is too burdensome to mandate a state-issued photo ID. The underlying subtext is that Republican controlled state legislatures are putting the voter ID laws in place because it will disproportionately affect likely Democratic voters.
The non-partisan Government Accountability Office studied the effect of photo ID laws and produced a report: Issues Related to State Voter Identification Laws (.pdf).
As part of its study, the GAO reviewed some existing studies. Five of these 10 studies found that ID requirements had no statistically significant effect on turnout; 4 studies found a decreases in turnout; and 1 found an increase in turnout that were statistically significant.
The GAO decided to run its own review of data and tried to find ways to compare the effect of voter turnout, controlling for issuing like hotly contested elections. The GAO used Kansas and Tennessee and benchmarked them to several other states that had not passed voter identification laws.
The GAO comes to the conclusion that voter turnout is reduced by 2-3 percent.
GAO found that turnout was reduced by larger amounts by age. Those between the ages of 18 and 23 than among registrants between the ages of 44 and 53 were less likely to vote. The turnout effect was 7.1% larger.
For those who had been registered less than 1 year the reduction was 5.2% greater than among registrants who had been registered 20 years or more.
For African-American registrants the reduction was 3.7% greater than among White, Asian-American, and Hispanic registrants.
Sources:
- Issues Related to State Voter Identification Laws
- Voter Identification Laws Hit Roadblocks in Wisconsin and Texas
Other reports on the effects of Voter ID Requirements:
- Alvarez, R. Michael; Delia Bailey and Jonathan N. Katz. “An Empirical Bayes Approach to Estimating Ordinal Treatment Effects.” PS: Political Science & Politics, vol. 19 (2011): 20-31.1
- Ansolabehere, Stephen. “Effects of Identification Requirements on Voting: Evidence from the Experiences of Voters on Election Day.” PS: Political Science & Politics, January 2009: 127-130.
- Bullock III, Charles S., and M.V. Hood III. “Worth a Thousand Words? An Analysis of Georgia’s Voter Identification Statute.” American Politics Research, vol. 36, no. 4 (2008): 555-579.
- Cobb, Rachel V.; D. James Greiner, and Kevin M. Quinn. “Can Voter ID Laws Be Administered in a Race-Neutral Manner? Evidence from the City of Boston in 2008.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science, vol. 7 (2012): 1-33.
- De Alth, Shelley. “ID at the Polls: Assessing the Impact of Recent State Voter ID Laws on Voter Turnout.” Harvard Law and Policy Review, vol. 3 (2009): 185-202.
- Dropp, Kyle A, Voter Identification Laws and Voter Turnout (May 2013), forthcoming.
- Erikson, Robert S. and Lorraine C. Minnite. “Modeling Problems in the Voter Identification—Voter Turnout Debate.” Election Law Journal, vol. 8, no. 2 (2009): 85-101.
- Gomez, Brad T. “Uneven Hurdles: The Effect of Voter Identification Requirements on Voter Turnout.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 2007.
- Lott, John R. Evidence of Voter Fraud and the Impact that Regulations to Reduce Fraud have on Voter Participation Rate (August 2006), forthcoming.
- Milyo, Jeffrey. The Effects of Photographic Identification on Voter Turnout in Indiana: A County-Level Analysis (Columbia, Missouri: Institute of Public Policy, University of Missouri, 2007).
- Muhlhausen, David B. and Keri Weber Sikich. New Analysis Shows Voter Identification Laws Do Not Reduce Turnout (Washington, D.C.: the Heritage Foundation, 2007).
- Mycoff, Jason D.; Michael W. Wagner, and David C. Wilson. “The Effect of Voter Identification Laws on Aggregate and Individual Level Turnout.” Paper presented at the 2007 American Political Science Association Annual Conference, Chicago, Illinois, August 2007.
- Mycoff, Jason D.; Michael W. Wagner, and David C. Wilson. “The Empirical Effects of Voter-ID Laws: Present or Absent.” PS: Political Science & Politics, January 2009: 121-126.
- Pitts, Michael J. “Photo ID, Provisional Balloting, and Indiana’s 2012 Primary Election.” University of Richmond Law Review, vol. 47, no.3 (2013): 939-957.
- Vercellotti, Timothy and David Andersen. “Protecting the Franchise, or Restricting It? The Effects of Voter Identification Requirements on Turnout.” Paper presented at the 2006 American Political Science Association Annual Conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 31- September 3, 2006.