Michael Wines and Manny Fernandez report that former Texas Rep. Pete Gallego, who lost his 2014 mid-term re-election bid by 2,422 votes in the sprawling 23rd Congressional District, has made a change in his campaign this year. As his campaign team canvasses a district geographically bigger than any state east of the Mississippi: “We’re asking people if they have a driver’s license. We’re having those basic conversations about IDs at the front end, right at our first meeting with voters,” Gallego says.
They’re doing so for a simple reason. A study has shown that while few people are actually turned away for not having the proper ID, many do not show up at the polls out of confusion over the law.
Researchers at the Baker Institute and the University of Houston’s Hobby Center for Public Policy asked 400 registered voters in Gallego’s district the reasons they didn’t vote in 2014. Too busy was the main reason given by a quarter of them. Lacking a proper photo ID was the main reason for 5.8 percent, with another 7 percent citing it as one reason. But the researchers found that most of those who said they didn’t vote because they didn’t have the right ID actually did have one. So Gallego’s team is taking a smart approach.
But having the right ID and not knowing it is only one problem. Eligible voters without proper ID are far more likely to be people of color. And that makes them, on average, more likely to be Democrats. As we’ve heard from a number of Republicans, most recently Todd Allbaugh of Wisconsin, the fact that strict voter ID laws suppress votes of Democrats is a boon for the GOP, making some Republicans “giddy.”
A study by Zoltan L. Hajnal, who teaches political science at the University of California, San Diego, compared a sample of 50,000 verified voters in states with and without strict ID laws. “We’re finding typically that strict voter ID laws double or triple the gap in turnout between whites and nonwhites,” Hajnal said. Nationwide, estimates of people without the kind of ID that can used for voting run as high as 13 percent. But these studies have shown that about 8 percent of white voting-age citizens and 25 percent of voting-age African Americans don’t have the right ID.
Texas law and the laws of at least 17 of the 33 states that require voters to show identification to cast a ballot require an ID with a photograph. Only some IDs can be used: driver’s license, state-issued personal ID or election card, military ID, passport, or citizenship card. Disallowed are student IDs, tribal IDs, and state employee IDs, among others.
The courts are still reviewing certain aspects of some state ID laws, including the one in Texas. But with the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Crawford case affirming photo IDs as legitimate, and with the Court’s neutering of a key element of the Voting Rights Act three years ago, states with a history of discriminating against African Americans, American Indians, and people who speak a language other than English are no longer required to “preclear” any changes in their voting laws with the U.S. Department of Justice. That doesn’t mean the laws can’t be challenged in court, but it’s much more difficult now.
In Texas, one of the 14 states imposing voter ID laws for the first time in a presidential election this year, it’s estimated that as many as 600,000 voting-age citizens don’t have the proper ID. Nationwide, a few million people are in that situation. And many of them also have problems—financial and otherwise—in obtaining the underlying documents required to get the proper ID.
The nation ought to have standardized voting laws in every state. But arranging that means overcoming constitutional barriers. Since the battle against strict voter IDs is all but lost barring some major change at the Supreme Court, the Democratic National Committee ought to be financially assisting state parties to the tune of a few tens of millions of dollars to ensure that citizens without proper IDs get them. That ought to be a standard element of the party’s get-out-the-vote efforts. That won’t guarantee that Pete Gallego or other Democratic candidates in close contests will win their elections, but it will remove one of the handicaps to their doing so.