Voting But for the Law: Evidence from Virginia on Photo Identification Requirements

• Date: 01 March 2017
• Author: Michael Morse,Jesse Yoder,Sarah Smith,Daniel J. Hopkins,Marc Meredith
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12142
• Published date: 01 March 2017

Voting But for the Law: Evidence from

Virginia on Photo Identification

Requirements

Daniel J. Hopkins, Marc Meredith,* Michael Morse, Sarah Smith, and

Jesse Yoder

One contentious question in contemporary election administration is the impact of voter

identification requirements. We study a Virginia law that allows us to isolate the impact of

requiring voters to show photo identification. Using novel, precinct-level data, we find that

the percentage of registered voters without a driver’s license and over age 85 are both

positively associated with the number of provisional ballots cast due to a lack of a photo ID.

To examine the law’s impact on turnout, we associate precinct-level demographics with the

change in turnout between the 2013 gubernatorial and 2014 midterm elections. All else

equal, turnout was higher in places where more active registered voters lacked a driver’s

license. This unexpected relationship might be explained by a targeted Department of

Elections mailing, suggesting that the initial impact of voter ID laws may hinge on efforts to

notify voters likely to be affected.

I. Introduction

Twelve states conditioned the right to vote on presenting proper photo identification at the

polls during the 2016 primaries.

1

This requirement, first introduced in Indiana in 2006, has

sparked one of the most contentious contemporary debates in election administration.

The lack of consensus stems, at least in part, from disagreement about the num-

ber of people harmed by these laws. Arguably the greatest harm occurs when a lack of

photo identification prevents someone who wants to vote and is otherwise eligible from

casting a ballot. While it is plausible that there is a sizable number of such individuals, it

*Address correspondence to Marc Meredith, University of Pennsylvania, Department of Political Science, Phila-

delphia, PA 19104; email: marcmere@sas.upenn.edu. Hopkins and Meredith are Associate Professors of Political

Science, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; Morse is Ph.D. Candidate, Department of

Government, Harvard University and J.D. Student, Yale Law School; Smith is Reporting Fellow at ProPublica,

Yoder is Ph.D. Student, Department of Political Science, Stanford University.

We thank Martha Brissette ofthe Virginia Departmentof Elections for assistance in collecting data on provisional

ballots, Michael Wood of Catalist for assistance in collecting voter fileinformation, the Virginia Public Access Project

for providing a precinct-level shapefile, and Alisha Chowdhury and Gabrielle Cuccia for their research assistance, as

well as GauravSood, Douglas Spencer, andtwo anonymous referees fortheir helpful comments and suggestions. We

also thank theUniversity of Pennsylvania Program on Opinion Research andElection Studies for financial support.

1

See Figure 1 and Table A.1.

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Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

Volume 14, Issue 1, 79–128, March 2017

is also plausible that there are few. The maximum estimated ownership rate of state-

issued IDs from government records is approximately 95 percent, leaving at the very

least 5 percent of registered voters potentially disenfranchised. A 5 percent reduction in

turnout would be both dramatic and detectable. However, Ansolabehere (2009) only

identified seven people out of 4,000 surveyed who reported not voting, at least in part,

because they lacked identification. Many registered voters without ID might not vote on

Election Day, irrespective of whether they have proper identification. Hood and Bullock

(2012), for example, show that people without a driver’s license in Georgia voted at sub-

stantially lower rates even when no photo ID was necessary to vote.

The Supreme Court is fractured on issues of voter identification, too. No opinion gar-

nered a majorityof the justices’ votes in Crawfordv. Marion County Election Board(553 U.S. 186

2008), the decisionupholding the original Indiana law. This wasin part because of the diffi-

culty of measurement: the Court’s controlling opinion acknowledged that the case record

contained “no evidence” of voter impersonation, but, as it pointed out, neither was there

“any concreteevidence of the burden imposed on voterswho now lack photo identification.”

Thirty-two states had some form of voter identification law in force during the 2016

primaries. As voter ID laws proliferated, a growing academic literature has attempted to

answer the questions first posed in Crawford. Extant work takes three gen eral approaches.

An access literature focuses on who lacks identification, although it is unclear what frac-

tion of these individuals are harmed in the sense that they would vote in the absence of

an identification requirement. A turnout literature addresses this criticism by attempting

to estimate the effect of voter identification laws on the number of voters. This work often

takes a difference-in-differences approach that compares trends in aggregated turnout in

states that did and did not adopt an identification requirement, though such an approach

has been critiqued for being systematically underpowered. A third, smaller strand of work

marries the access and turnout literatures. Hood and Bullock (2012) study variation in

individual-level turnout among registered voters who did and did not match to a DMV

record. Unfortunately, privacy laws make it difficult, if not impossible, to replicate such a

design in many other states and no subsequent research has.

2

Each of these research approaches has been valuable, but the difficulties with

simultaneously distinguishing voter intent, achieving statistical power, and demonstrat-

ing external validity, respectively, have meant that the literature to date is a logjam of

conflicting results that have not resolved the initial questions raised in Crawford. In this

vein, we offer a new design to study voter ID laws. We use the lessons of Hood and Bull-

ock (2012) to propose a methodological compromise that relies on aggregated, public

information about voters available in many states. Our ecological approach shifts the

unit of analysis to the precinct and models precinct-level turnout changes after a photo

identification requirement is implemented as a function of many precinct-level charac-

teristics, including the share of registered voters who file a provisional ballot for lack of

2

The Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994 “generally prohibits academics from receiving driver’s license lists in

order to conduct research in this area” (Stewart 2013). Hood and Bullock were able to access the DMV data

because Hood was an expert witness in Common Cause v. Billups.

80 Hopkins et al.

ID and the share who lack a driver’s license. Thus, while our method cannot rival the

granularity of results in some work, it offers researchers more opportunity for compara-

ble empirical investigations of voter ID in other states, where the legislation, implemen-

tation, and impact may vary.

State voter identification laws are typically characterized across two dimensions.

Some states are strict about requiring identification to vote, while others—considered

“nonstrict”—merely request it. Some states also consider only a narrow range of photo

IDs as valid identification, while others permit nonphoto IDs such as a utility bill or pay-

check. Pitts (2012) helpfully clarifies that “there is actually very little [legal] controversy

about voter identification generally.” Rather, “the flashpoint of dispute ... is when states

adopt laws that essentially exclusively require a government-issued photo identification.”

Seven states had such policies as of 2014: Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennes-

see, Virginia, and Wisconsin. We focus specifically on Virginia.

Virginia offers two primary benefits as a case study. For one, Virginia’s incremen-

tal policy making allows us to isolate the legally relevant effect of a strict photo ID poli-

cy. In 2013, Virginia had a strict nonphoto ID policy; in 2014, it kept its strict approach

but limited acceptable forms of ID to those with a photo. Virginia also has a unique

election cycle, featuring a competitive, state-wide general election in both the year

before and the year of this policy change. By comparing precinct-level turnout outcomes

in elections of similar salience immediately before and after the law change, we mini-

mize the risk that factors besides the new photo ID requirement are causing turnout to

change between the two elections.

We focus on two different pathways through which a strict photo ID requirement

burdens voters. Some people show up to the polls but are unable to vote because they

lack proper ID, which we term ineligibility. Other voters do not show up to vote or oth-

erwise anticipate problems voting, which we term deterrence.

We observe ineligibility using a public records request. Our design is motivated by

Justice Stevens’s controlling Crawford decision, particularly in its call for more focused evi-

dence on who “would vote were it not for the law.” The plaintiffs in the Crawford case could

not find a single person who fit the bill. Under Virginia law, anyone who tried to vote with-

out showing a valid photo ID was offered a provisional ballot instead. In other words, there

is documentary evidence of some people who “would vote were it not for the law.” We col-

lect precinct-level data on provisional ballots cast for lack of proper photo ID in the 2014

general election: 474 provisional ballots were cast in Virginia in the 2014 election for lack

of adequate photo identification. This number measures the effect of ineligibility, and thus

serves as a useful lower bound of the total effect of the photo ID requirement on turnout.

We relate the number of provisional ballots cast because a voter lacked a photo

ID to precinct-level demographic characteristics constructed using state Department of

Elections reports, Census data, and data from Catalist, a commercial data vendor. Our

results show that the two most robust predictors of such provisional ballots are the per-

centage of registered voters with no DMV record—validating the focus of the access lit-

erature—and the percentage of registered voters over age 85. While we need to be

cautious to avoid necessarily ascribing individual-level interpretations to ecological

regressions, these findings are consistent with people without a valid driver’s license, the

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Voting But for the Law