- A first look tonight at a study of Wisconsin voters
sparking national attention.
UW-Madison Political Science Professor Ken Mayer surveyed
Dane and Milwaukee County registered voters who did not
vote in the 2016 presidential election,
finding that Wisconsin's voter ID law discouraged thousands of
voters.
According to the survey, commissioned by the Dane County
Clerk, 11.2% of eligible nonvoting registrants were
deterred from voting which according to the study results,
corresponds to well over 16,000 people and could be more than
23,000 people, depending on the survey's margin of error.
The survey also found that a disproportionate number of
people who did not cast ballots citing the voter ID law were
low-income and minority voters.
Just more 21% of low-income voters were deterred from
voting, compared to just over 7% of higher earners.
While 8.3% of white voters were deterred by the ID law,
27.5% of African Americans were deterred from voting.
We caught up with the study's author,
Professor Ken Mayer upon its release this week.
We started by asking about the survey's conclusions.
- What we concluded is that the voter ID law had a substantial
effect on a number of voters.
I think it's really one of the first studies that has
demonstrated that there were thousands of people whose right
to vote was interfered with.
We call it deterred.
Or in some cases I think we can state that people were
effectively prevented from casting a ballot
because of the ID requirements.
- Who, according to your results,
was most likely to be deterred from voting?
- Well, there's -- past research has demonstrated that
there are vulnerable populations: low-income,
minority, poor.
These are the types of individuals who are most likely
to be affected because they're least likely to possess the
forms of ID and our findings were consistent with that.
We found that African-Americans were over three times as likely
to report that they had either been deterred in voting or
prevented from voting.
And you see a similar difference when we're looking at low-income
individuals, where actually about six times as likely to say
that they were affected by this than high-income individuals.
Again, this is consistent with other research that looks at
patterns of ID possessions and where the burdens of these laws
tend to fall.
- Given those demographics, is it your professional opinion
that this is in fact the purpose of Wisconsin's voter ID law and
others across the country?
- Well, we've been very careful in presenting the studies not to
make those conclusions.
This was a specific empirical question.
We were interested in how many people were affected and what
their demographic characteristics are.
So I'm not going to make a claim about motivation.
Our intention was to present the empirical findings and
contribute to the debate over the nature of these laws.
- Such laws are supposed to address voter fraud, though.
Is that right? - That's correct.
- And in your mind, do they? - No.
The research is absolutely conclusive.
The forms of voter fraud that these laws can address,
which is really nothing other than voter impersonation.
Someone showing up at the polling place and claiming to be
someone else on the rolls and voting in that person's place.
Study after study after study, anybody,
any neutral or informed person, scholar, academic,
student who has looked at this has concluded that that kind of
fraud is just vanishingly rare.
We're talking about maybe one or two cases in an election.
Justin Levitt who's a law professor at Loyola University
in Los Angeles looked at credible cases of voter
impersonation over a 18-year period and found out of more
than a billion votes cast, there were maybe 30, 31 cases.
So the notion that these laws actually address a form of voter
fraud is just simply incorrect.
And so here, again, we make an empirical statement that we have
good evidence that thousands of people
were essentially prevented from voting by these laws.
Balancing against that that there are no cases of voter
impersonation that these laws can address.
- As to what your survey found, you discovered that people who
actually had qualifying ID to vote didn't
because they were confused about the law.
- That's correct.
Most of the people who cited ID as a reason they didn't vote
actually turned out to possess a qualifying form of ID.
And that's actually consistent with other similar studies that
have concluded the same thing.
One of the most common misconceptions is that people
believe that their driver's license or photo ID has to have
their current address or the same address
that they registered under.
And that's not true.
It doesn't have to.
And that kind of confusion contributes to
disenfranchisement because people don't quite understand
what the law means and how it works.
And so they wind up thinking that they're ineligible to vote
when they actually are.
- Why did the Dane County Clerk commission this survey?
- So, his goal, as he explained it to me,
is that he wanted to find evidence of what the effect was
and how he might best deploy his resources to educate people on
the nature of the law.
It was basically to identify the empirical question,
how many people were affected and is there anything that he
might be able to do to educate people about the law.
- Now, your survey shows that the number of voters deterred
from casting a ballot would not have been enough to change
election results.
So why is this information important?
- Well, again, we are also very clear not to make the claim that
the numbers that we found would have flipped the election or
that the numbers that we find in Dane and Milwaukee County can be
immediately extrapolated to the state.
In my view, the harm here is not simply whether the election
would have changed.
That's the wrong metric.
When you have thousands of people who are effectively
disenfranchised, unable to vote -- and I should point out that
about 80% of the people that we identified as being affected by
this, the voter files show that they actually voted in 2012.
That's a serious harm.
Disenfranchising people for no reason is in itself a harm to
the integrity of the electoral process.
- Ken Mayer, thanks very much. - My pleasure.
- In reaction to Mayer's voter ID study,
the state treasurer said Dane County should have
its shared revenue reduced by $55,000, calling that amount
for its commission of the survey a "complete waste of money."