A new Wisconsin research study has found that voter ID laws do not negatively affect voter turnout.
Will Flanders with the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty examined voter turnout in Wisconsin over a 20-year period, beginning with the 2004 presidential election, and found no evidence of turnout suppression.
In 2011, Wisconsin implemented a law that mandated voters to show photo IDs when voting, and on April 1, Wisconsinites will be voting to enshrine this law into the state’s constitution.
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“By analyzing decades of election data both before and after Wisconsin implemented Voter ID, we found a general rise in voter turnout, rather than the widespread disenfranchisement that critics often suggest,” Flanders said in a statement. “Any claims suggesting Voter ID is ‘voter suppression’ are merely political scare tactics aimed at undermining faith in Wisconsin’s elections. Furthermore, it’s worth exploring whether Voter ID can actually increase turnout by strengthening confidence in Wisconsin’s election system.”
Flanders’s study found that once voter ID laws were enacted in Wisconsin, voter turnout increased by 1.5%. The study also found that voter ID laws had no significant effect on the turnout of nonwhite voters, contrary to critics’ arguments as to what would happen if the law is enshrined in the state constitution.
“This is an interesting result. While it is likely too large of a leap to say voter ID has increased turnout due to the correlational nature of our analysis, it seems that there is no negative relationship,” the study read. “This could be due to an increase in confidence that elections are safe and secure, or simply because elections since the passage of the law have garnered more public interest.”
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty study found that socioeconomic factors such as poverty rates and education levels had a stronger correlation with voter turnout than voter ID laws.
However, other studies suggest the opposite, such as one from 2020 that examined voter turnout data between 2012 and 2016. It found that a disparity existed in voter turnout between counties that were more racially diverse and other counties after the enactment of photo ID laws.
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A 2021 poll found that 74% of Wisconsin voters are in support of a photo ID requirement.
As of November 2024, 35 states had laws requiring voters to show their photo IDs.