Voter ID and Race, Part 2

In Part 1, I presented evidence that racially prejudiced individuals are more likely to support voter ID laws. Please read it before continuing.

Of course, public opinion does not automatically translate in social policy. In 2012, Bentele and O'Brien published a study in which they used multiple regression to examine what state-level variables were most strongly associated with both the proposal and passage of voter ID laws. The following variables predicted proposal and passage of restrictive legislation:

• Republicans controlled both houses of the legislature and the governorship. 83% of voting restrictions were passed by Republican-controlled legislatures.
• The state had become increasingly competitive in the last presidential election. Note that passage of voter ID laws required both increased competitiveness and Republican control. Those states that had become more competitive but had Democrats in control were less likely to pass voter ID laws.
• The state had a higher proprtion of African-American and Latino residents, and minority and low income turnout had increased in the last presidential election.
• There were more allegations of voter fraud. This variable had less impact than the other three. Note also that very few allegations of voter fraud have been substantiated.

Their study is entitled “Jim Crow 2.0.”

What about the individual legislators who vote for voter ID laws? Earlier this year, Mendez and Grose reported an experiment in which 1871 state legislators from 14 states with relatively high Latino populations received an e-mail from an apparent constituent asking whether a driver's license was required in order to vote. The legislators were randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups. The e-mail either came from an Anglo (Jacob Smith) or a Latino (Santiago Rodriguez) man, and was written either in English or Spanish. The dependent measure was whether or not the legislator replied. Here are the results:

	Supports Voter ID	Does Not Support Voter ID
Anglo Name/English	45.0%	50.3%
Latino Name/English	27.5%	43.4%
Anglo Name/Spanish	10.1%	12.5%
Latino Name/Spanish	1.1%	11.7%

The results are clearest with the English-language e-mail. Those who supported voter ID were 17.5% more likely to respond to the Anglo constituent, while those who did not support voter ID were 6.9% more likely to respond to the Anglo constituent. Response rates were depressed considerably when the e-mail was in Spanish, but the same pattern was obtained. Supporters of voter ID were more likely to discriminate against Latino constituents.

Did the legislators themselves decide whether or not to answer the e-mail, or was it a staff member? It probably doesn't matter, since legislators hire like-minded staff members.

The authors claim that the experiment shows discriminatory intent on the part of legislators who supported voter ID. It could be argued that Republican legislators cast their vote for partisan reasons, and the fact that they also happened to be prejudiced was coincidental. However, not all Republicans supported voter ID, and further analysis showed that those Republicans who voted in favor of voter ID were more likely to discriminate against the Latino constituent than those Republicans who voted against it. (No Democrats in the entire sample supported voter ID laws.)

I'm not suggesting that prejudice and political partisanship are separate alternative explanations for support for voter suppression, either among legislators or the general public. It is likely that Republicans support these laws both because they harbor racial resentment and because the laws are advantageous to their party. In fact, in the last six years, attitudes toward a variety of political issues, such as health care, have become more strongly correlated with racial attitudes. The Republican Party has gradually evolved into an unabashedly racist party, much like the neo-Nazi parties of Europe.

I woke up yesterday morning to the following headline: “GOP calls for travel ban for West Africa over Ebola.” Will Republican Congresspeople be willing to support adequate financial aid for Ebola-stricken countries, or will they use fiscal austerity as an excuse to throw West African Black people under the bus?

You may also be interested in reading:

Voter ID and Race, Part 1

Don't Forget Not to Vote

Old-Fashioned Racism

Voter ID and Race, Part 1

With the election coming up in two weeks, voter ID laws are back in the news. The Supreme Court has accepted or rejected state voter suppression laws in a seemingly random pattern, without explaining their rationale. In news stories about voter ID, the corporate media typically demonstrate false balancing. They fail to examine Republican claims that voter impersonation is a problem. (It is not.) They report but don't evaluate the Democrats' argument that voter ID laws suppress turnout among key Democratic constituencies, such as the poor, minorities, and college students. (There is evidence to support this claim.) While the media sometimes imply that these laws are politically motivated, new evidence suggests that they may also be motivated by racial prejudice. These studies confirm every bad thing you suspected about voter ID laws.

In a new study, David Wilson and his colleagues at the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication (CPC) used cognitive priming to test the prejudice hypothesis. Their experiment was embedded in the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, managed by computer by YouGov/Polimetrix. They had 1436 US adult respondents, 1100 of whom were White. The White participants were randomly assigned to one of three versions of a question asking them whether they favor or oppose voter ID laws. For one-third of the respondents, the question was accompanied by a photo of a White voter and poll worker. For another third, the voter and poll worker were African-American. The remainder of the participants were not shown any image. The photos and the wording of the question are shown in the results table below.

Support for voter ID laws was quite high. Most importantly, when given the Black prime, a reminder of the fact that African-Americans vote, the White respondents were more in favor of voter ID laws than when given the White prime or no prime at all. The fact that the race of the prime was manipulated in a true experiment suggests that race plays a causal role in attitudes toward voter ID.

These results are consistent with an earlier correlational study by Wilson and Brewer. This was a 2012 telephone survey of 906 adult Americans conducted by the CPC. Particpants were asked their party affiliation (Democrat, Republican or Independent) and their political ideology (liberal, moderate or conservative). White respondents were also given a three item measure of racial resentment similar to the Symbolic Racism Scale:

• I resent any special considerations that African 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.

As indicated in the chart, Republicans and conservatives supported voter ID laws more than Democrats and liberals. There was also a significant correlation between racial resentment and support for voter ID. Racial resentment was higher among Republicans and conservatives than Democrats and liberals, with Independents and moderates in the middle. However, racial resentment still had a significant effect on attitudes toward voter ID laws even when controlling for political partisanship, ideology and several other demographic variables. Interestingly, racial resentment had a greater effect on the attitudes of Democrats and liberals, since Republicans and conservatives overwhelmingly support voter ID laws regardless of how much racial resentment they express.

Of course, public opinion does not automatically translate in social policy. Please see Part 2 of this post.

You may also be interested in reading:

Voter ID and Race, Part 2

Don't Forget Not to Vote

Old-Fashioned Racism

Do We Still Need the Voting Rights Act? (Does a Bear Shit in the Woods?)

Last week, at the very moment President Obama was unveiling a statue of Rosa Parks at the Capitol, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court was expressing its determination to undo one of the signature achievements of the civil rights era—the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, which prohibits “denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

Dick Gregory at a Voting Rights Act rally on February 27
Photo by SEIU International

The challenge, Shelby County v. Holder, is to Section 5 of the VRA, which requires all or part of 16 states with a history of racial discrimination to clear in advance with the Justice Department any changes in their election laws that might affect the right of racial minorities to vote. Localities that have not had a VRA challenge to their laws for ten years can “bail out” from Section 5—that is, they are no longer required to obtain preclearance. Like the rest of the country, they come under the default option, Section 2.

The good news about Section 2 is that it only requires the plaintiff to prove a discriminatory effect, rather than discriminatory intent. Discriminatory intent is almost impossible to prove, since elected officials seldom publicly admit an intention to violate the law. But the bad news about Section 2 is that you can only challenge voting discrimination after the fact, when the damage has already been done. It is the preclearance provision in Section 5 which gives the VRA its real power by shifting the burden of proof onto those who would change the law to demonstrate that the change does not have discriminatory impact.

Shelby County v. Holder was brought forward by the Project on Fair Representation, a conservative legal organization that is funded exclusively by Donors Trust, which also contributes to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, and Americans for Tax Reform. While contributions to Donors Trust are anonymous, its supporters are suspected to be a who's who of wealthy conservatives, including the Koch brothers. Project on Fair Representation received $1.2 million from the Donors Trust between 2006 and 2011.

Shelby County, Alabama, is challenging Section 5 on two somewhat inconsistent grounds. First, they are saying that voting discrimination against African-Americans is no longer a problem in the South. It seldom happens. Secondly, they are saying that this thing that seldom happens also happens in the rest of the country as well, and therefore, Section 5 discriminates against the states that are subject to its provisions.

Both of these claims are empirical questions. How many cases have been brought against states and communities under the VRA from 1965 to the present? Has this number changed over time? How does the number of cases among the regions subject to Section 5 compare to the number of cases in the rest of the country? The only non-empirical question raised by the case is how many cases of racial discrimination would be few enough to justify abandoning Section 5.

The VRA has been reauthorized by Congress four times, most recently in 2006, when it was renewed for 25 years. At that time, Congress held 21 hearing over 10 months, compiling 21,000 pages of testimony on voting discrimination. The VRA renewal passed by a vote of 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House, suggesting that Congress at least was persuaded that will still need the VRA.

The best source of data on violations of the VRA is the research of Morgan Kousser, who has compiled an exhaustive list of 4,141 voting rights cases. Of these, 90%, and 93.4% of successful challenges (those which resulted in a judgment of discrimination), occurred in jurisdictions covered by Section 5. This is not surprising, since you can only bring a Section 5 challenge in those localities. More persuasive, however, is the fact that 83.3% of the successful Section 2 cases, which can be filed anywhere in the country, came from jurisdictions subject to Section 5 oversight. (By the way, there have been 20 violations of the VRA in Shelby County since 1975, the most recent having occurred in 2008.)

Chief Justice Roberts turned the relatively clear question before the Court into a confusing abstraction by asking the Justice Department lawyer whether he thought “the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North.” (Roberts was referring to individual racism, or racial prejudice, rather than institutional racism.) There are a number of reasons why this is the wrong question.

• Individual racism is difficult to measure. It can be measured in several different ways which vary in their subtlety. In general, the more transparent the question and the more consciously controllable the answer, the less prejudice there will appear to be.
• Prejudice is an attitude while discrimination is a behavior. For a variety of reasons, social psychologists have found the correlation between attitudes and behavior to be fairly weak. In other words, people say one thing and do another.
• It is not the behavior of all citizens of the South or North that is at issue. It is the behavior of their elected representatives. Citizens influence their representatives indirectly, and often only after the fact.
• Voting discrimination can be motivated by many other goals in addition to personal prejudice, i.e., a desire to obtain a partisan advantage for one's political party.

Now would seem to be a particularly bad time to overturn Section 5. The increasing racialization of politics since the 2008 election has resulted in a greater concentration of the most prejudiced Americans in the Republican party, the majority party in most of the Section 5 jurisdictions. The ability of Republicans to win national elections is threatened by demography—by the greater number of young people and minorities in the voting pool. As a result, they have been attempting more sophisticated voter suppression methods. As Ari Berman reports, six of the nine states fully covered under Section 5 passed new statewide voting restrictions affecting minorities after 2010: voter ID laws (Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia), restrictions on voter registration (Alabama and Texas), and limits on early voting (Georgia).

Only one third of the noncovered jurisdictions have passed voter suppression laws since 2010. Of course, that's still too many, as Pennsylvania residents know all too well. One of the more reliable ways of discouraging voting, creating long waiting lines at the polls, disproportionately affects Black and Latino voters, and to my knowledge has never been challenged by the VRA. If anything, we need to expand the scope of Section 5 of the VRA to include all the states and to include all strategies that have a discriminatory effect on voting.

Post Script

By now, you have probably heard about Justice Scalia's reference to the VRA as “the perpetuation of racial entitlement.” This was initially interpreted to mean that voting is, for Blacks at least, a privilege rather than a right. However, if we look at his remarks in context, a different agenda emerges.

Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political process. I don't think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act. And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless—unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution. . . .It's—it's a concern that this is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress.

Scalia seems to be saying that Congress cannot be trusted not to pander to political correctness. Therefore, it is up to wiser men like himself to overrule their judgment. This is a strange argument coming from someone who has previously argued against judicial activism, or legislating from the bench. But Scalia has never let the Constitution get in the way of his political ideology. In this respect, he has become an even greater embarrassment to the country than Justice Thomas, who at least has the good sense to keep his mouth shut.

On Queue

As I've previously written, one of the most effective ways to suppress voter turnout is to create long waiting lines at the polling place so that many potential voters will leave in frustration. This method has long been used to discourage voting in minority areas and around college campuses. It can be done by not having enough polling places or voting machines in heavily populated areas, or by creating procedural delays, such as requiring I.D. checks, but not having enough poll workers to carry out these operations efficiently.

This method of voter suppression is insidous for a couple of reasons. First, unlike other voter suppression efforts, it leaves no traces. There is no way to accurately count the number of discouraged voters. Secondly, the public often blames the victim and argues that if discouraged voters had only been more patient, there would have been no problem. Needless to say, this ignores the fact that many people have other obligations, such as work and child care, and cannot afford to spend hours in line at the polling place.

This problem is finally receiving some of the attention it deserves. The New York Times reports the results of a survey by political scientist Charles Stewart showing that blacks and Hispanics wait longer in line than whites. The survey was conducted over the internet by YouGov/Polimetrix. They contacted 10,200 people, 200 from each state and the District of Columbia, for a survey on “the quality of the voting experience.” The average self-reported wait time was 14 minutes. Here are the differences by race:

Race	Waiting time
White	12.7 minutes
Hispanic	20.2 minutes
Black	20.2 minutes

They also found significant differences by size of county, with people from larger counties—that is, urban areas—waiting longer. There were large differences by state, with Vermont having the shortest average wait time (2 minutes) and Florida the longest (45 minutes).

Is this a representative sample? YouGov/Polimetrix is a polling organization that is increasingly popular with social scientists. They provide opt-in internet survey panels. People volunteer to participate in internet surveys. They are notified by email when their participation is requested. For each completed survey, they receive points exchangeable for prizes such as movie tickets and gift cards. A recent study suggests that their results are as valid as more expensive telephone surveys, primarily because of recent declines in public willingness to participate in telephone surveys. While you might think that their volunteers would be higher in political interest than the average person, YouGov/Polimetrix actively recruits low interest respondents and can statistically weight its results to correct for this and other types of unrepresentativeness.

Another response to this survey might be, “They are lying.” That is, critics might speculate that African- and Hispanic-Americans deliberately exaggerate their wait times in order to claim the status of victims of discrimination. I doubt whether the wait time issue is sufficiently politicized to produce this type of bias, but if it is, you could claim that whites might also exaggerate their wait times in order to deny that they are beneficiaries of discrimination.

The Stewart study focuses attention of Florida, whose average wait time was 11 minutes longer than the second worst location, D. C. The Orlando Sentinal recently commissioned an engineering professor, Ted Allen, to estimate the number of Floridians who left without voting on Election Day, 2012. Dr. Allen has developed a mathematical model which predicts turnout suppression from parameters such as number of registered voters, number of voting machines, ballot length, etc. It was originally developed to measure voter suppression near the Ohio State campus in 2004. Although the model is too mathematically complex for me to understand, it is published in peer-reviewed journals.

One of Allen's more important discoveries is that you can predict turnout suppression from the number of hours the polls have to stay open after closing time. For each additional hour the polls stay open, turnout is suppressed by about 4.8%. This allows you to estimate the number of discouraged voters in each precinct. If you then assume that the discouraged voters would have voted for the candidates in the same proportion as those who actually voted at that location, you can estimate the number of votes lost by each candidate.

Based on the sample of precincts he analyzed, Allen estimated that 201,000 Floridians left in frustration on Election Day, which is 2.3% of the number of votes cast. He predicts that 108,000 of these votes would have gone to Obama and 93,000 to Romney, so Obama's margin of victory would have been 15,000 votes greater had these people voted. Obama carried the state by 74,309 votes.

There are many remedies for long waiting lines, including making Election Day a holiday, expanding early voting times, and ensuring that the number of polling places is proportional to the population. It is outrageous that, in many states, one party controls voting procedures and manipulates them to serve their interests. There is speculation that President Obama will call for voting reform in the State of the Union address. However, as long as Republicans continue to benefit from voter suppression, it is unlikely that reform legislation will get through our gridlocked Congress.

Don't Forget Not to Vote

The lack of accurate knowledge of the likely effect of Pennsylvania's voter ID law on election turnout has been frustrating. Estimates of the percentage of citizens lacking ID vary considerably because they are inferred indirectly from large public data bases. It's obvious that the best way to find the answer is to interview a random sample of Pennsylvania voters and ask them directly whether they have the identification required by the law.

Fortunately, a survey was commissioned by the plaintiffs in Applewhite, et al. v. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, an ongoing legal case brought in Commonwealth Court by a coalition of groups that are challenging the law. It was conducted by Dr. Matt Barreto, a survey researcher from the University of Washington. Dr. Barreto's report is available online, along with appendixes containing the wording of the questions and the tables of results.

The survey was conducted by telephone using random digit dialing, which ensures that all telephone numbers—listed or unlisted—have an equal chance of being chosen. A sample of 1285 people was obtained, 78% of them from landline exchanges and the remainer from cell phones. Since the impact of the law on Black and Hispanic voters was of special interest, they were deliberately oversampled from commercially-available lists, which should improve the accuracy of the estimates for these subgroups. The survey has a margin of error of +/-2.7%. That means that if 50% of the respondents say their favorite color is red, then 95% of the time the true percentage who prefer red will be between 47.3% and 52.7%.

34.6% of those who answered the phone agreed to participate in the survey. Since about 30% of the calls were not answered (in three tries), the response rate—the percentage of those called who completed the survey—was 24.2%. I started doing research when people seldom screened their calls and were more willing to answer research questions, so this response rate seems low to me. However, a response rate of 20-30% is considered acceptable by contemporary standards.

All of the respondents were asked as many questions as necessary to determine whether they had a valid photo ID under the law in their possession—either a current driver's license or any one of ten other acceptable forms of ID. To be valid, the ID has to have an expiration date and be issued in their current legal name. The major results were:

1. 14.4% of eligible voters (1,364,433 people) lack a valid photo ID under the law. Looking only at registered voters, it is 12.8%, and 12.6% of those who voted in 2008.
2. 37.3% of eligible voters, 34.3% of registered voters, and 34.2% of 2008 voters don't even know that the voter ID law exists.
3. 97.8% of eligible voters, 98.8% of registered voters, and 98.7% of 2008 voters believe they have a valid ID. Comparing these figures to the percentage who actually have a valid ID shows that many people are mistaken and unlikely to do anything about it before election day.
4. If you don't have a valid ID, in order to get one you need proof of citizenship, proof of address, and a social security card. 27.6% of those who do not have a valid ID will be unable to obtain one before election day because they lack one or more of those documents.

The impact of the law on the election depends on the differences among demographic subgroups in eligibility to vote. The following data are for eligible voters, although the differences are quite similar for registered voters or those who voted in 2008.

1. Gender. Women (17.2%) are more likely to lack a valid photo ID than men (11.5%).
2. Age. People over 75 (17.8%) and under 35 (17.9%) are more likely to lack ID than middle-aged people (10.3%).
3. Race. 14% of Whites, 13.2% of Blacks and 18.3% of Hispanics lack a valid ID. The nonsignificant difference between Whites and Blacks was a surprising finding.
4. Education. Voters without a high school diploma (18.5%) were most likely to lack ID. As education increases, lack of ID declines. Only 8.3% with a college degree lack ID.
5. Income. Income is the strongest predictor of lack of ID. 22% of those making less than $20,000/year lack valid ID, compared to only 8.2% of those making more than $80,000/year.
6. Region. Voters living in Allegheny—that is, Pittsburgh and vicinity—(18.7%) and Philadelphia (17.8%) Counties are less likely to have ID than those living in the rest of the state.

In 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain by 10.3% in Pennsylvania, which was considered a landslide. Early indications are that this year's election will be much closer. Obviously, disenfranchising 14% of eligible voters can have a considerable impact on the outcome, especially since almost all the subgroups that are more likely to lack ID currently show a preference for the President.

The survey shows that, in passing this voter suppression law, Pennsylvania's Elephants have succeeded beyond their wettest dreams. When House Majority Leader Mike Turzai told his fellow Elephants that the law would “allow” a Romney victory in November, this was no idle boast. A better word might have been “ensure.”

Prior to this month's hearing in Commonwealth Court, the Corbett administration agreed in a court document that it knows of no cases of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania, and does not anticipate any in November. However, they argue that evidence of fraud is unnecessary to justify the law. It is sufficient that legislators can “imagine” the possibility of fraud.

If the court allows this outrageously bad law to stand, it's time for Pennsylvania's citizens to grab their torches and pitchforks and begin the long march to Harrisburg.

Addendum

I'm glad to see that the plaintiffs are thinking about one of the less obvious but more important impacts of the voter ID law—its tendency to slow down lines at the polls. Long waiting lines at the polls are already a problem in many areas of Pennsylvania, especially in low income areas and near college campuses. Unfortunately, if people give up and go home rather than face long queues, there will be no public record of the fact that they have been discouraged from voting by the law.

Legislative Fraud

When you vote on November 6, there may be an Elephant in the room.

The Pennsylvania Senate yesterday passed a voter ID law that will require voters to show photo identification when the go to the polls in November. It passed 26-23, with three Elephants breaking ranks with their party to vote against it. It is expected to pass in the Elephant-controlled House, and Governor Tom Corbett has said that he supports it. The ACLU of Pennsylvania has stated that the law is unconstitutional since it discriminates against the poor and the elderly. They have promised to challenge the law to prevent it from being implemented.

Here's a case where thinking slowly might help. If the Elephants are sincere, it's hard to find a clearer example of irrationality in the political process. Those who claim that voter fraud is real are usually referring to other types of irregularities that either don't involve actual voters, such as voting machine tampering, or don't involve actual fraud. The Brennan Center for Justice has thoroughly investigated cases of alleged fraud at the polls. Those that are not false rumors usually involve mistaken identity, clerical error, or unintentional violations by people who do not realize they are ineligible to vote. In a brief filed in an 2007 Indiana case, they state, “(N)ot one of the citations offered by Indiana or its allies refers to a proven example of a single vote cast at the polls in someone else's name that could be stopped by a pollsite photo ID rule.”

A bit of slow thought reveals why it is rare for unauthorized people to attempt to vote. It's a ridiculous way to try to affect an election. The perpetrator risks a $10,000 fine and up to five years in prison in order to cast a single extra vote. If ineligible persons had ever attempted to vote in numbers large enough to influence the outcome, it would surely have been detected.

Of course, it's disingenuous to pretend that the Elephants are unaware that voter ID bills are "a solution in search of a problem." Their real purpose is voter suppression. Voter ID laws have been enacted or are are pending in at least 26 states. As many as 5 million legitimate voters could be deterred from voting by these laws. And they discriminate against the elderly, the poor, minorities and young people—groups that typically vote for Jackasses. Nationwide, about 18% of seniors and 25% of African-Americans don't have photo ID. The partisan nature of this "debate" is revealed by the fact that recent votes in state legislatures have been almost completely along party lines.

The latest defense of the indefensible by proponents of the bill is the claim that it will alleviate fears of voter fraud.  But the only reason there are fears of voter fraud is their own disinformation campaign.

In one respect, Pennsylvania's voter ID law is less objectionable than those of most other states. It permits college students to use university ID cards as a valid photo ID for voting purposes. College students are likely to favor Obama by a large majority. How could the Elephants have let this happen?