Luger; it all depends on the details of how the law is implemented, and the
proposed amendment itself doesn't provide those details.
On Sep 4, 2012, at 7:27 PM, Duane Quam wrote:
> The US Supreme Court ruled, decision written by Justice Stevens, that photo
ID requirements
> are not an undue burden. It also determined that it did not surpress voters.
The actual data
> showed that minority voting increased at a greater percent than the average
population.
I would like to hear more about the data that showed that. I looked around on
Google, and I found corroborating claims about Indiana and Georgia:
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2012/08/31/opinion-is-voter-suppression-myth/
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/despite-voter-id-law-minority-turnout-up-in-georgi/nR2bx/
Unfortunately, neither of those sources provides the raw data necessary to
actually understand the claims. In any case, both cases are confounded by the
Obama election, which (I believe) saw huge increases in minority registration
and turnout nationwide. The Georgia case compares data from 2006 to 2010, which
eliminates the direct effect of voting for Obama, but most of those 2008
registrations remained on the books; voters may have been "activated" by 2008
in a way that carried over to 2010; and many of those who had to overcome
obstacles to comply with the voter ID law had already done so for the 2008
election.
To better understand the impact of voter ID on minority voting, it would be
useful to compare turnout changes in states that *did* and *didn't* enact voter
ID laws, over the same time period, and preferably with similar demographics
and politics (and, in a perfect world, let's throw in "without the ascension of
the first major-party non-white Presidential candidate in American history").
Of course, we can't conduct a controlled experiment; we can only look at the
numbers that exist. But do you know of anyone who has collected those numbers?
Since we're talking about data: Minnesota, of course, has had consistently high
voter turnout (for the United States) up to now. But on a quick search, I
couldn't find any data on how our turnout breaks down across racial lines. Does
anyone know whether our "high 70s" turnout rate is reflected in minority
populations?