Tag: Vote suppression
Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law May Have Suppressed 300,000 Votes
300,000
Associated Press: “By one estimate, 300,000 eligible voters in the state lacked valid photo IDs heading into the election; it is unknown how many people did not vote because they didn’t have proper identification. But it is not hard to find the Navy veteran whose out-of-state driver’s license did not suffice, or the dying woman whose license had expired, or the recent graduate whose student ID was deficient.”
Democrat Turnout is Down in States that Have Enacted Voter ID Laws
37%
Amount Democratic turnout has dropped in eight out of the 16 states that have held primaries or caucuses that implemented new voter ID or other restrictive voting laws since 2010, reports Huffington Post. But turnout is down “just 13 percent in the states that didn’t enact new voter restrictions. To put it another way, Democratic voter turnout was 285 percent worse in states with new voter ID laws.”
Millions More Wanted to Vote in 2012, But Couldn’t
We estimate that keeping registration open through Election Day in 2012 would have allowed an additional 3 million to 4 million Americans to register and vote. We used the number of Google searches for ‘register to vote’ in the weeks leading up to the 2012 election to measure late interest in registering. These search terms were entered millions of times, and much of the activity fell at the very end of the campaign period.
— Alex Street, writing in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.
New Study Links Support for Voter ID Laws to Racial Resentment
Despite its conclusion, the study was not produced by Duh University and at least one surprising tidbit it uncovered shows it.
New research from the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication found that people with high “racial resentment” scores, along with those who consider themselves Republicans and conservatives, are most likely to be concerned about the largely imaginary issue of vote fraud.
Intense vote fraud investigations in Iowa have produced a confused elderly man who voted twice, a college student whose parents are divorcing who didn’t get the postcard, and a lady who lives at the address on her voter ID but gets mail elsewhere
To gauge their depth of racial resentment, non African-American survey respondents were asked how strongly they agreed with these statements:
- I resent any special considerations that Africans Americans receive because it’s unfair to other Americans.
- Special considerations for African Americans place me at an unfair disadvantage because I have done nothing to harm them.
- African Americans bring up race only when they need to make an excuse for their failure.
Not all liberals and Democrats came up clean in the survey.
