I've long argued that the main point of Protect Arizona Now! (aka Prop 200) is really not to prevent voter fraud (as there really is no such thing as individual vote fraud anymore - much easier and effective to just reprogram the tabulators), but to suppress the electoral participation of legally eligible minority voters. Well, the evidence is in and what many, including myself, had presumed has turned out to be exactly right (here I am trying blatantly to boost your confirmation bias in favor of myself as an accurate prognosticator...), PAN and other voter ID laws have the effect of reducing minority participation in those states that have such laws by as much as 10%.
Here's the skinny:
Just last month, the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University presented new research findings to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission that suggest Latinos, Asian Americans and African Americans are less likely to vote as a result of increasingly restrictive voter ID requirements. The Eagleton study examined the 2004 election and concluded that in states requiring voters to present an ID at the polls, voters were 2.7 percent less likely to vote than in states where voters were merely required to state their names. Latinos were 10 percent less likely to vote, Asian-Americans 8.5 percent less likely to vote and African Americans 5.7 percent less likely to vote.
What this means is that the bastards who promoted these laws are really out to disenfranchise Americans, not prevent foreigners from voting fraudulently; or, if that was not their object, they've done an uncannily good job of accomplishing an unintended consequence that so many warned them of that if they didn't intend it, then they are just incompetent idiots, rather than racist louts.
More important than the assignment of blame, however, is the legal jeopardy that these findings represent to such voter ID laws. These laws have been looked askance by the federal courts before, now courts are likely to get another crack at them. There is now demonstrable evidence of a disparate impact upon protected classes - racial and ethnic minorities, and possibly national origin - under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection jurisprudence. Without any evidence that these laws are actually addressing a compelling governmental purpose, i.e. preventing voter fraud, they are very susceptible to constitutional challenge. I suspect it will not be long before we are seeing a challenge to these laws in federal courts, hopefully in time to banish these abominations before the 2008 elections.
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