Can Voter Identification Laws Increase Electoral Participation in the United States? Probably Not—A Simple Model of the Voting Market

Abstract

Proponents of voter photographic identification (ID) laws in the United States have argued that such measures can increase overall voter turnout. The implications of this proposition contradict classic models of voting behavior, which state that voting costs and electoral participation are inversely related. The present article/research note explores this tension in the context of some fundamental economic concepts. Namely, after identifying characteristics of a voting "market" that might facilitate the outcome in question, a simple model of that market is developed and used to simulate changes in turnout due to changes in voter ID rules for a hypothetical polity. Counter to proponents' claims, the findings suggest that voter ID laws tend to decrease turnout, even when most voters place positive value on stricter (i.e., fraud preventing) voting regulations. That being said, the model is intentionally simplistic, and it is put forward primarily as a tool for thinking critically about the relationship between voter ID laws and electoral participation. Because data that are suited to empirical analyses of this relationship are lacking, complementary techniques, such as modeling and simulation, are useful for testing unverified hypotheses about voter ID rules from the political discourse. The simple exercises in this research note begin to fill this gap, though they function most readily as points of departure for future research.

Why the Sky Didn't Fall: Mobilizing Anger in Reaction to Voter ID Laws

“…Most theories of participation would predict these laws will demobilize voters, at least marginally. Weaver () formalizes the expectation drawn from Downs () that the impact of these laws on the costs to participation should outweigh any reasonably sized psychological benefits due to perceptions that the system is free of voter fraud. In addition, there is no evidence that concerns about vote fraud are very large or that they vary systematically as a function of the stringency of the voter identification requirements at the state level (Ansolabehere & Persily, ).…”

The Suppressive Impacts of Voter Identification Requirements

“…Such theories predict that the weighing of costs and benefits, as well as access to information about elections and candidates, influences who is likely to participate or not. For would-be voters, ID requirements could add to the burden or cost of voting (Hajnal et al 2017;Highton 2017;Larocca and Klemanski 2011;Weaver 2015), leading to lowered likelihood of participation. In this way, voter ID rules may illustrate how electoral policies "set constraints and boundaries for political participation" (Jones-Correa 2001:42).…”