US 2012 Election - Voter Suppression

[Lord Falcon]

It's in the news every night, all the voter suppression taking place across the country. We know it's happening. So here's my question: Why aren't people DOING anything about it? I know a few courts struck down these voter suppression laws, but it's not working fast enough! Imagine if Romney won because of voter suppression! God, the horror! I do NOT want to live through a repeat of Bush's policies and have Romney be elected due to taking away the most basic right of all Americans! He would be the so-called "false president," NOT Obama. Please tell me there's something that can be done. They say over 51 million people — 51 MILLION PEOPLE — may be unable to vote in this election. That is... just staggering. I know some people who prepared to take desperate measures to prevent the government from taking us over. If Romney wins, and they push us too far, I have no doubt they'll do something drastic, and we'll end up with a Communist revolution on our hands.

[Kamakazie Sith]

You sound kind of crazy, man.

A communist revolution?

If the courts are working fast enough what do you think should be done about it?

[Lord Falcon]

How did the Communist Revolution happen in Russia? Because the rich were abusing the poor and they rose up in rebellion. I can totally see that if the rich keep pushing us people storm their houses in a fury and execute them. It isn't as farfetched as you might think.

It's just the whole point. I don't want a president who didn't win the election fairly.

[Block]

You don't seem to understand the deep hatred for Communism that still runs through a large swathe of the country.

[Tanasinn]

The Russian revolution(s) also happened under much more dire circumstances, with the support of a considerable portion of the heavily-abused soldiery.

[Maraxus]

Calm yourself, chicken little. Voter suppression through more strenuous voter requirements is a serious problem that could have serious impact if the race is very close. Fortunately, at this point it doesn't look like the election is going to be very close. Nate Silver wrote a really interesting article on this not long ago, and basically concluded that while more draconian voter requirements do limit Democratic-leaning turnout, it's something in the neighborhood of .4 to 1% of the vote. That's not enough to swing any states for Romney unless the election is really really close. Considering Obama's been posting +8 point leads in most swing states, it's not serious enough to start hyperventilating over. Pennsylvania's voter ID law, which is probably the most rigorous, is afterall in a state Obama won by better than 10 points last election and seems well on his way to repeat his victory. -1% of the vote won't stop a decisive win like that.

The article is worth quoting at length.

Measuring the Effects of Voter Identification Laws

By NATE SILVER
Almost every day, I get e-mails and Twitter messages asking me about the effect of voter identification laws on turnout. Most of these messages, I presume, are from Democrats. They worry that more onerous laws, like those in Pennsylvania, could make it more difficult for Democratic-leaning voting groups like African-Americans and young voters to participate in this November's election.

These concerns are perfectly logical -- although it is also possible to exaggerate the effects that these laws might have. Academic studies suggest that they very probably reduce turnout, but not by more than a couple of percentage points. And although Democratic voters may be more affected by the laws, some Republican voters will be disenfranchised by them, too.

As I mentioned, there are quite a number of academic studies that seek to evaluate the effect of identification laws on voter turnout; John Sides has compiled a list of them here; or you can do some searching for yourself on Google Scholar.

On the surface, these studies seem to disagree with one another about whether or not there is any effect on turnout from harsher voter identification laws. But if you read them in more detail, you'll find that much of the disagreement is semantic rather than substantive.

There is something of a consensus in the literature, in fact, about the rough magnitude of the effects. The stricter laws, like those that require photo identification, seem to decrease turnout by about 2 percent as a share of the registered voter population.

Whether this effect is deemed to be "statistically significant" or not varies from study to study. It depends on what particular type of statistical test the researcher has applied, and how much data he or she is looking at.

Statistical significance, however, is a funny concept. It has mostly to do with the volume of data that you have, and the sampling error that this introduces. Effects that may be of little practical significance can be statistically significant if you have tons and tons of data. Conversely, findings that have some substantive, real-world impact may not be deemed statistically significant, if the data is sparse or noisy.

My view is that something which might reduce turnout by 2 percent in a key state is meaningful in a practical sense -- at least if you looking at the election in a detail-oriented way, as we often do.

Statistical significance tests start by specifying a null hypothesis. In the case of these studies, the null hypothesis is that voter identification laws do not impact turnout. Then it's a question of whether the data is robust enough to persuade you otherwise. Some studies say that it is, and others say it isn't.

However, the null hypothesis is not very logical in this case. Why should we give the benefit of the doubt to notion that voter ID laws will not affect turnout? The mechanism for how these laws work is very simple, after all. Some people show up at the polling place and find that they are not able to cast a ballot (or must vote by provisional ballot) when they otherwise would have voted. It would be stunning if these laws didn't have some downward effect on the number of legal votes counted. (If you're using Bayesian statistics, the hypothesis that voter ID laws do impact turnout would be your prior belief.)

In other words, although the effects seem to be small, and although their precise magnitude is uncertain, the position that they don't have any effect at all is hard to defend.

With that said, there is also not necessarily a reason to think that the laws would reduce turnout by more than a couple of percentage points. It's important to keep the following in mind:

The vast majority of adults do have some sort of identification.
Many people who do not have identification are not registered to vote -- or if they are registered, they are unlikely to turn out.
The laws may be inconsistently enforced by thousands and thousands of poll workers at the precinct level.
In many cases, voters without proper identification can cast a provisional ballot, which could eventually be counted in the event of a vote-counting dispute.
The campaigns have an opportunity to educate their voters about ID requirements as part of their turnout operations.
News media accounts, like some of those about the new voter ID laws in Pennsylvania, sometimes seize on the most dramatic estimates of the effects of these laws -- rather than the most accurate ones.

It has been reported, for instance, that about 750,000 Pennsylvanians, or about 9 percent of the state's registered voter pool, do not have a ID issued by the state's Department of Transportation. The 750,000-voter figure, however, includes some cases where there are database-matching problems: for instance, a woman is listed by her married surname in one database and her maiden surname in another may be included on that list, even though she should have few problems voting. It includes some cases of voters whose registrations are inactive. And it includes voters who will have some valid form of ID other than that issued by the Department of Transportation, like a passport, which would still make them eligible to vote. Based on the experiences of other states, it is more likely that these laws will prevent something like 2 or 3 percent of registered voters from actually casting a ballot, rather than 9 percent.

Still, that could be meaningful depending on which candidate these voters would have chosen. None of the studies I mentioned have sought to measure how a decline in turnout could effect the Democratic and Republican candidates in particular, rather than the overall figure.

But some implied that Democratic-leaning voting groups, especially African-Americans and Hispanics, were more likely to be affected. Others found that educational attainment was the key variable in predicting whom these laws might disenfranchise, with race being of secondary importance. If that's true, some white voters without college degrees could also be affected, and they tend to vote Republican.

Nevertheless, it's clear enough that stricter voter ID requirements are probably bad for Democrats, on balance. In almost every state where the ID laws have been at issue, Republican governors and legislatures have been on the side of passing stricter ones, while Democrats have sought to block them.

I sought to back into an estimate of the net effects of these laws, therefore, in a couple of different ways. First, I compared the popular vote in each state in 2008 against the turnout there, as listed at Michael McDonald's Web site. As a control, I looked at the party identification of all adults in the state in 2008, according to Gallup polling. This analysis suggested that for every one-percentage point increase in voter turnout, Barack Obama's margin over John McCain increased by about six-tenths (0.6) of a point in 2008.

Alternatively, I looked at the change in the popular vote margin between 2004 and 2008 as a function of the change in turnout. (For this version of the analysis, I excluded states that were the home state of any of the presidential or vice presidential candidates in 2004 or 2008, since this introduces noise related to native-son effects.) This version indicated that a 1-point increase in turnout increased Mr. Obama's margin over John McCain by about 0.4 percentage points in 2008.

Both of these estimates are crude -- I am open to looking into more robust means of estimating these effects, in case any of you have ideas.

But they square with the general notion that higher turnout is helpful to Democrats, on balance. If you take the average between them, it suggests that a 1-point increase in turnout would improve the Democrat's margin in the popular vote by a half a percentage point, accounting for other factors.

I then looked at which states have changed their voting laws since 2008, according to the National Council of State Legislatures. Their Web site classifies states along a 4-point spectrum from having no voter ID laws to strict photo identification requirements.

Pennsylvania, for instance, went from having no voter ID laws to a strict photo ID requirement. Based on the academic studies, I estimate that this will reduce turnout by about 2.4 percent as a share of registered voters. And based on my formula to convert changes in turnout to changes in the popular vote, I estimate that this would reduce President Obama's margin against Mitt Romney by a net of 1.2 percentage points.

Changes for other states are listed in this table; I exclude cases where changes in a voter ID law have been struck down by courts, or are pending approval by the Department of Justice. Note that, other than Pennsylvania, no swing states have passed major changes to voter ID laws, although others like Wisconsin have sought to pass laws that have been struck down.

Starting with Saturday's forecast, these shifts are applied to the "state fundamentals" calculation that the FiveThirtyEight forecast model uses along with the polls in each state. The state fundamentals calculation is based on large part on how the state voted in 2008 or 2004 -- so if there have been changes in the fundamentals since that time which we think might have predictable effects, it is worth accounting for them.

I do not apply any adjustment to the polls themselves. My notion is that the pollsters are responsible for accounting for these effects, such as by means of their likely voter models or their mechanism of accounting for registered voters.

The effects of the adjustment are ultimately fairly minor. In Pennsylvania, for instance, it reduced Mr. Obama's chances of winning the state to 82.6 percent from 84.2 percent, according to the model's estimate. Still, it makes Pennsylvania a little closer, and slightly increases the chance that it will be the tipping point state in the election.

One last thing to consider: although I do think these laws will have some detrimental effect on Democratic turnout, it is unlikely to be as large as some Democrats fear or as some news media reports imply -- and they can also serve as a rallying point for the party bases. So although the direct effects of these laws are likely negative for Democrats, it wouldn't take that much in terms of increased base voter engagement -- and increased voter conscientiousness about their registration status -- to mitigate them.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.co ... tion-laws/

Also, your sense of history is almost as bad as your sense of drama. There are plenty of things to worry about in this election. An evil Republican conspiracy to stop all of Obama's voters from getting to the polls does not seem to be one of them.

[Hillary]

When 90%+ of the population are voting for right wing parties, I can't really see the idea of a communist revolution taking off

[SirNitram]

And here I thought we'd have a nice, mature discussion about the massive increase in anti-voter laws, continuance of use of the ridiculously easily hacked Diebold machines, and of course, of groups which actively target and try and intimidate minority voters.(I'm looking at you, True The Vote.)

Nope, stupid crap about 'communist revolution'.

[Simon_Jester]

Sometimes you get fringe loonies who look around here, are too impressed by the wrong parts of the forum, and want to emulate what they see as the prevailing intellectual current?

Anyway, yes. The Russian Revolution happened because the Russian military and economy was falling apart under the strain of World War One. People were starving. Millions of soldiers were dead, for war aims the average Russian had never given a damn about anyway.

Picture a hundred Iraq Wars, fought all at once. That would at least begin to hurt and bleed the US something like the way World War One bled and hurt Czarist Russia.

Even then it didn't become a communist revolution straight away; the Bolsheviks had to spend something like six or eight months organizing a coup to make it happen.

[Zaune]

Let's face it, though; if anyone can make the people of the United States reevaluate the pros and cons of Marxist, Mitt Romney can.

Seriously, though, I think it would be very unwise to dismiss the possibility of some kind of violent action. Remember that notorious video of a campus security officer pepper-spraying a bunch of unarmed, non-resisting students? Every time something like that happens, and I don't think anyone here is naive enough to think it won't be repeated, the odds of one of the supposedly peaceful protestors pulling their dad's .38 out of their back pocket and taking a potshot at the cops approaches 1:1. The odds of some trigger-happy rookie forgetting everything he was taught about checking your background before opening fire and hitting a bunch of innocent bystanders are only slightly lower. And best of all, the whole clusterfuck will be all over the Internet in half a dozen horribly distorted versions before the bodies have cooled!

And if... No, let's face it. When that happens, God help us all.

[PeZook]

Dude, the US had in its history National Guard troops open fire on unarmed college students. You also literally had Air Force bombers called in to assist in putting down a massive miner's strike.

There's a difference between violent incidents, and even widespread violent unrest, and a revolution. Revolutions happen when the majority of the people have no choice and the state unravels at the seams, becoming unable to provide the most basic services.

You may see violent unrest if things get worse, which will suck, but the US has survived violent unrest in the past.

[Simon_Jester]

You really only get revolutions when the machinery of state control breaks down because random people are no longer willing to kill or die for the existing regime.

A lot of dictators ultimately proved themselves so worthless, corrupt and evil that they got to this point (remember Ceausescu). But it's very rare that a democratically elected government gets there. Because ultimately, if the state really is unpopular enough for a revolution to be come possible, the public will just vote it out of office.

The status quo may seem intolerable to YOU (for some definition of 'you,') but if the masses aren't already rioting it's tolerable to the masses... which means revolution is a long way off, and not something oneshould be fantasizing about.

[Tanasinn]

Let's face it, though; if anyone can make the people of the United States reevaluate the pros and cons of Marxist, Mitt Romney can.

Seriously, though, I think it would be very unwise to dismiss the possibility of some kind of violent action. Remember that notorious video of a campus security officer pepper-spraying a bunch of unarmed, non-resisting students? Every time something like that happens, and I don't think anyone here is naive enough to think it won't be repeated, the odds of one of the supposedly peaceful protestors pulling their dad's .38 out of their back pocket and taking a potshot at the cops approaches 1:1. The odds of some trigger-happy rookie forgetting everything he was taught about checking your background before opening fire and hitting a bunch of innocent bystanders are only slightly lower. And best of all, the whole clusterfuck will be all over the Internet in half a dozen horribly distorted versions before the bodies have cooled!

And if... No, let's face it. When that happens, God help us all.

It didn't happen during 'Nam, when the national guard was actually murdering protestors in broad daylight. It takes a lot to get normal people to resort to lethal violence.

[Lord Falcon]

Ok, I admit I was a bit impetuous in calling it a Communist revolution, but I still a revolution, maybe not a Communist one, as a real possibility, especially since I see lots of parallels between the Russian Revolution and here.

Anyway, I feel way more reassured. Thanks, everybody.

[Simon_Jester]

Falcon, what parallels? We don't have mass famines, we don't have soldiers revolting and deserting to form armed political factions in the capital, we don't have ethnic separatists trying to peel off provinces from the borders...

2012 US is so immensely better off than 1917 Russia that it almost defies description.

What are you talking about?

[LaCroix]

To be fair, a lot of people depending on food stamps and charity are the 1st world equivalent of a famine, but that's absolutely no correlation to the situation in Russia.

[Simon_Jester]

I think we are in agreement.

See, with food stamps feeding the poor, you don't have mobs of starving people willing to grab guns to get the granaries thrown open. That makes all the difference.

[Lord Falcon]

Well, true. I guess the only parallel is the rich abusing the poor.

[Simon_Jester]

And that always happens.

More seriously, don't make the mistake of assuming the problems you (we) have now are as bad as the grand epics of the past. America has problems, but the sheer scale of wealth in a modern developed society tends to mask them.

If we are less than we could be, we are also much, much more than we could be, and it's being toward the bottom of that scale that usually touched off past revolutions.

[Sea Skimmer]

In 1917 the Germans were marching on the Russian capital and it was feared they would destroy it when they arrived. if this happened in 2012 I think most of the US population would be cheering them on and passing out torches.

[Lord Falcon]

Ok, but I just saw on the news that the Tea Party is trying to ban 730,000 college students from voting. Is this voter suppression going to continue right up until the election? How can those kids get to vote? Especially if they made it like hell to get their IDs? Why are they getting away with this? See, this is what I'm worried about; the courts take FOREVER to render judgments! What if people don't get to vote in time? Can Obama legally challenge it?

[TimothyC]

Ok, but I just saw on the news that the Tea Party is trying to ban 730,000 college students from voting. Is this voter suppression going to continue right up until the election? How can those kids get to vote? Especially if they made it like hell to get their IDs? Why are they getting away with this? See, this is what I'm worried about; the courts take FOREVER to render judgments! What if people don't get to vote in time? Can Obama legally challenge it?

Are they banning them from voting or are they simply requiring that students vote at their place of permanent legal residence (which is often their parent's home)? If it's the later, then what is stopping the student from voting absentee? The only limit I can see is that it requires that people think about the process ahead of time and plan accordingly.

I'm also going to give you a piece of advice. Try and avoid confirmation bias. It's not always easy, but it will help you out in the longer term.

[Lord Falcon]

All I see are massive wrongs being committed. Why can't they arrest these idiots? They are specifically targeting people who tend to vote Democrat. That is politically motivated and it is illegal.

[Kamakazie Sith]

All I see are massive wrongs being committed. Why can't they arrest these idiots? They are specifically targeting people who tend to vote Democrat. That is politically motivated and it is illegal.

There is no law on the books that says attempting to make illegal laws is illegal. At least not that I'm aware of.

[Lord Falcon]

Dammit... still, couldn't the US Supreme Court find these practices unconstitutional? I've heard cases where they refused to back down. Why don't they arrest them once they defy the courts' order?