If you have a question about voter identification laws in your state, and you're Latino, use an anglo-sounding email alias if you want to get a real answer. That's just one of the conclusions to draw from a
new study on voting rights conducted by Harvard PhD candidates in government Ariel White, Noah Nathan, and Julie Faller. The three found there wasn't just a problem in states with tough, discriminatory voter ID laws:
In September 2012, we contacted essentially all local election officials with short e-mails asking questions about voting. These e-mails were identical except for the name of the sender. A randomly selected half of the officials in each state received e-mails from a Latino name like “Luis Rodriguez,” while the others received the same e-mails from a non-Latino white name like “Greg Walsh.” (A similar type of experiment has been used to measure discrimination in everything from housing markets to state legislatures.) […]
The Latino and non-Latino e-mailers both received many helpful responses. But nationwide, Latino names received fewer responses than non-Latinos and were more likely to receive vague and uninformative information about identification requirements.
This tendency for Latino names to receive fewer responses was not significantly larger when we asked about voter identification. This tendency was similar in states with and without voter identification laws, suggesting that the bias extends beyond the voter identification issue alone.
This finding held in red states and blue states and among both Republican and Democratic elections officials. But there was a glaring exception in their findings—the one group that did not discriminate against Latinos were "officials from jurisdictions covered for 'pre-clearance' and federal monitoring against discrimination under two provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act." In other words, the Voting Rights Act has done what it was supposed to do, create institutional mechanisms in these states that had a history of voting discrimination to combat it.
That, however, is subject to change, since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the VRA, the provision that established the guidelines for identifying the state and local governments that have to comply with the preclearance requirements. That decision was handed down in 2013, after this research was conducted.
As the researchers conclude, the implicit bias in voting officials likely compounds the difficulties that minority voters already face in states with voter ID and other voter suppression laws. They not only have to figure out how to comply with those laws, but face barriers in that attempt.
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