Voter photo id laws.

Voter SuppressionPhoto ID laws impose a cost to voting on those without state-issued IDs. My [7] puts the average cost of a state-issued ID around $14 to $58. [8] puts the cost for low-income voters even higher, at $75 to $175. Wylted doesn't argue these costs.When the costs of voting increase, turnout decreases. That’s "common sense," and Wylted doesn't argue that either. Instead, Wylted debates a different issue: "provisional ballots," "reasonable accommodations," and "absentee ballots." But neither of those reduce burdens on low-income individuals who lack both state-issued IDs and the required underlying documents.The "provisional ballots" argument fails for two reasons. First, you're still required to provide a photo ID. "If the voter does not come back to show ID, the provisional ballot is not counted." [Pro's 1] Second, they impose a greater cost via the time wasted waiting in line to vote, the effort to get a photo ID, and then having to return to the election office to present the ID. These costs matter so much that most provisional ballots are never counted, even after voters already invested time showing up on election day. [18] That means some interested voters don't get their votes counted.The "reasonable accommodations" argument fails because it's limited to a small group of voters with specific burdens like religious objections or victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault. The "reasonable accommodations" don't cover low-income nondrivers (mostly minorities), which is the main group that's disenfranchised by photo ID laws.The "absentee ballots" argument fails because some states require photo ID to request an absentee ballot. If they don't, they impose strict limits on who can vote absentee (i.e. must be absent from the district on election day, be ill, be older than 65, or scheduled to work during the entire 12-hour voting period). [19] Most low-income individuals without photo ID can't vote "absentee" without first getting a state-issued ID.Finally, if voter fraud is an "actual" rather than "invented" problem, as Wylted claims, then "absentee ballots" that don't require photo ID are a gap in Wylted's version of the law. In fact, the evidence shows "absentee ballots" are a much more common source of fraud than in-person voting. [6] [7] Wylted cannot advocate "absentee ballots" as a solution when his stated reason for having photo ID laws is to prevent voter fraud.--Wylted ignores my "voting is a low-reward activity" argument. Extend that argument. Even a small cost on voting can depress voter turnout.--Wylted cites a Reuters article for the idea that photo ID laws don't suppress voters. But this so-called “legitimate study” isn't "highly respected" (no academic, lawyer, judge, or policymaker has cited it), nor is it a “legitimate" study (it’s written by a journalist with no background in statistics). The article says voter turnout increased in Georgia and Indiana in the 2008 election. But that doesn't mean photo ID laws didn't suppress voters. There are two key flaws in the article's analysis. First, the article notes that 2008 was "an anomaly because many blacks were determined to vote for Obama." Of course, turnout increased across the entire country in 2008, so increased turnout alone doesn't prove that voters weren't suppressed. Second, the article fails to compare turnout in photo ID law states with turnout in non photo ID law states. When you compare states, the data shows that turnout increased more in states without photo ID laws. [7] The Government Accountability Office, an independent agency that prepares reports for members of Congress, analyzed three data sets to compare Kansas/Tennessee (photo ID law states) with Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, and Maine (non photo ID law). The study found 1.9 to 2.2 percent less voters in Kansas, and 2.2 to 3.2 percent less in Tennessee. That's 122,000 voters that photo ID laws suppressed. Moreover, unlike Wylted's source, the GAO report "applied criteria to ensure that the [considered] states did not have other factors present in their election environments that may have significantly affected turnout." This chart summarizes the results: Prefer my sources to Wylted's, as his source fails to consider relevant data and misapplies statistical reasoning. Also, apply "common sense": the idea that voter ID laws increase minority voting -- which is what Wylted's source suggests -- simply doesn't make sense. Obstacles to voting don't increase voter turnout. And if photo ID laws actually increase minority voting, liberals should rejoice in the laws and conservatives deplore them. Yet it’s conservatives who support them and liberals who oppose them. Unless conservatives and liberals are masochists, promoting laws that hurt them, Wylted's source is just bad journalism, and photo ID laws suppress minority voting, not increase it.Voter FraudWylted says the News 21 study is "trash." That's an unfair characterization. Yes, the study has limits, but so does every social science study. That doesn't mean the study is "trash." We do the best we can with the available data. The question is whether those limits significantly affect likelihood of the study's conclusion. They do not.The News 21 study analyzed 2,068 election fraud cases over 10 years and found that only 10 cases involved in-person voter fraud. However, 645 cases could not be "categorized as one kind of fraud or another." To be sure, that limits the completeness of the study. But it also means 10 out of 1423 cases were in-person voter fraud, or 0.7%. That result alone shows that in-person voter fraud doesn't threaten voting integrity. If we extrapolate that percentage to the uncategorized cases, you only get 4 more cases of in-person voter fraud. However you spin the News 21 study, it's results are clear: in-person voter fraud is exceedingly rare. And, of course, other studies (which Wylted has yet to address) confirm this result. [7] [11] [12] [13] [14] Even Fox news. [15]--Wylted ignores my argument about the costs, complexity and risks of orchestrating massive in-person voter fraud. Wylted also doesn't address the EAC study, which says "impersonation of voters" is the "least frequent type of fraud because it is the most likely type of fraud to be discovered" and it's "an inefficient method of influencing an election." [16] Extend this argument.Further note: If a photo ID law is necessary to deter voter-impersonation fraud, then such fraud would be common -- maybe even rampant -- in states that don’t require a photo ID. But there’s simply no evidence that in-person voter fraud is common in those states.Wylted says voter fraud is hard to detect. But there's no evidence of that. And even if it's hard to detect, in-person voter fraud is still so inefficient, risky, and costly that there's no reason politicians would pursue it over other forms of fraud. Especially since [16] says in-person voter fraud is the easiest to detect.--Wylted says photo ID laws stop multiple voting, noncitizen voting, people voting in the wrong precinct, and out-of-state voting. Not so. Photo ID requirements don't stop multiple voting (or at least I don't see how they would). State-issued IDs are available to noncitizens. And photo ID laws generally don't require that your voting address match your ID's address. [Pro's 1]Also, photo ID laws don’t work against other types of fraud, like vote buying, misleading or confusing ballot papers, ballot stuffing, misrecording of votes, misuse of proxy votes, destruction of ballots, tampering with voting machines, intimidation and threats of violence, legal threats, economic threats, and manipulation of demography.--Wylted should be held to his sources. [Pro's 2] states: “Data and numerous interviews by Reuters reporters also suggest there is little evidence to bolster Republican assertions that ID laws are needed to combat rampant voter fraud.” It continues: “Georgia officials could not point to a single documented instance of voter impersonation before or after the law took effect.” If you accept Wylted’s source, then you also have to accept that voter fraud isn’t a threat.Voting IntegrityWylted says photo ID laws increase the integrity of elections, or at least increase public perception of integrity. But there’s no evidence that photo ID laws promote public confidence in elections. In fact, “Vote Fraud in the Eye of the Beholder: The Role of Public Opinion in the Challenge to Voter Identification Requirements,” an article by Stephen Ansolabehere & Nathaniel Persily, finds that perceptions of voter-impersonation fraud aren't affected by the strictness of a state's voter ID law. [20] That means photo ID laws don't increase voters' confidence in the honesty of elections. This, in turn, means that photo ID laws won't reduce voter-impersonation fraud, because if they did, one would expect perceptions of its prevalence to change.ConclusionWylted says we should apply common sense. But Wylted cannot win this debate via common sense. Common sense says voter turnout decreases when the cost of voting increases. And when it comes to voter fraud, common sense says in-person voter fraud is an invented problem, because politicians won't risk orchestrating a massive campaign of voter-impersonation fraud. The costs and risks are too high. I've cited multiple studies that support these common sense points with empirical data. When both common sense and the overwhelming force of empirical evidence says that photo ID laws depress voter turnout, and that voter-impersonation fraud isn't a threat to the integrity of elections, the conclusions aren't debatable. The net effect of these two facts is that photo ID laws depress voter turnout without justification.Sources:[18] http://lawreview.richmond.edu...[19] http://www.longdistancevoter.org...[20] http://cdn.harvardlawreview.org...