Do voter identification laws disenfranchise voters disproportionately?

Voting is among the many rights that define us as Americans. As shown in the tweet above, Trump is one of many who call for states to check the identification of citizens before they vote.

In 2013, the Supreme Court invalidated the preclearance clause of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This clause ensured that there would be federal oversight over changes in states’ voting laws to prevent laws that would discriminate against the minorities'. The majority of the Supreme Court believed that this clause no longer applied today while Justice Ginsberg refutes this, saying just because circumstances are better now than when the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 it doesn’t mean that the overall systemic issue is resolved. 

Now, since the ruling, many states have already put in place voter ID laws; unfortunately, implementing these laws can disenfranchise many who are unable to access such documents. An algorithm produced by Harvard and Tufts researchers Stephen Ansolabehere and Eitan Hersh used Texas voting records to identify individuals. According to their research, 1 in 2.7 billion individuals have the same zip code, gender, date of birth, and last name―four key indicators sufficient for establishing one’s identity. Due to discrepancies in government records -- typos, incomplete and outdated information, or nicknames --, they compared the accuracy in the predictions made by combinations of three of those fields, comparing state voting records data to a wide variety of government documents. Checking their results with voter data containing innately unique Social Security numbers, they found that 98 percent of the voting records “could be matched using any three of the four key identifiers―address, date of birth, gender, and name.” Using Catalist, a tool that predicts each voters race, they discovered, “3.6 percent of registered white voters had no match in any state or federal ID database. By contrast, 7.5 percent of black registered voters were missing from those databases.” In other words, not only will some voters be disenfranchised by the voter ID laws, there is a “clear” racial disparity on voting rights.

What many who oppose the notion of voter ID laws to ensure election security claim, this study confirms, which is that African American voters and other minorities are less likely to have adequate identifications and thus are their suffrage limited, as is their place in American politics.

Source:
https://www.wired.com/story/voter-id-law-algorithm/
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/25/18701277/shelby-county-v-holder-anniversary-voting-rights-suppression-congress