Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes

For our analysis, this includes the political competitiveness of each state (measured as the margin of victory in the most recent presidential contest), the presence of different electoral contests (presidential elec- tion year, the presence of senatorial and gubernatorial elec- tions), whether the senatorial and gubernatorial contests are open-seats or not, and whether the senatorial and guberna-. [...] Specifically, we added a series of different measures of (a) the parti- sanship of the state political leadership, (b) the partisanship and ideology of the public, (c) the level of partisan competition in the state, and (d) racial demographics (see the appendix). [...] THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF VOTER IDENTIFICATION Opponents of these strict voter ID laws also regularly claim that one of the main motivations behind the laws is to limit the participation of Democratic-leaning groups in order to This content downloaded from 132.239 All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms benefit the Republican Party. [...] The extra gap between La- tino and white turnout in these states was 2.5 points in the general election and 7.3 points in the primary.22 The pattern in earlier years is similar.23 The gap between minority and white turnout generally grew more in Tennessee and Kansas between 2008 and 2012 when those two states enacted strict voter ID laws for the first time than it did in other states. [...] Between 2010 and 2014, the black-white gap in turnout increased by 9.6 points more in the general election (and 1.1 points more in the primaries) in Alabama than in the rest of the nation over the same time period.