Immigration reform 2015 news – Study finds Latino voters in Texas were discouraged from voting despite carrying valid ID

Last Wednesday, a Texas federal appeals court panel unanimously agreed that the state's strict voter identification law discriminates against black and Hispanic voters. A closer look at the landmark law's effect found minorities had proper ID, they just didn't know it.

A joint study conducted by the University of Houston Hobby Center for Public Policy and Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy focused on Latino-heavy Congressional District 23 (CD-23). Aside from finding that Latino non-voters were significantly more likely than Anglo non-voters to cite a lack of ID as a reason not to vote, the study also suggested registered Latino voters were just as discouraged from casting their ballots.

Telephone surveys of 400 registered voters - both Democratic and Republican - revealed 12.8 percent of respondents didn't vote because they lacked one of seven eligible ID's necessary. When asked further about ID's in their possession, researchers found just 2.7 percent, not 12.8 percent, could not vote in person.

"The most significant impact of the Texas voter photo ID law on voter participation in CD-23 in November 2014 was to discourage turnout among registered voters who did indeed possess an approved form of photo ID," researchers wrote. "but through some combination of misunderstanding, doubt or lack of knowledge, believed that they did not possess the necessary photo identification."

Driven by controversial results for the district's representative chair, they agreed that four or five times more voters would have chosen Democratic incumbent Rep. Pete Gallego over eventual winner, Rep. Will Hurd. The negative impact on Gallego's campaign, study authors said, was overwhelmingly a product of not understanding voting requirements.

"While the results of this survey do not allow us to conclude that Gallego would have been re-elected in the absence of the voter photo ID law, they do indicate that the law did have a disproportionate impact on his supporters, and therefore may have possibly cost him the election."

Texas carries one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country, requiring voters to take a government issued photo ID to the polling place. Here, a permit to carry a concealed weapon is considered valid while student IDs and voter registration cards are not accepted.

Fear behind the law stems from the possibly of voter fraud, though only two people have been convicted for voter impersonation fraud over the last 10 years. Thirty-four states still uphold the law, yet more and more are finding that it violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Even former Justice John Paul Stevens, a staunch conservative appointed by President Gerald Ford, admitted to having a change of heart on voting rights. More recently, Indiana Judge Richard Posner said the Indiana law he upheld was "a means of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention."

To find a solution, researchers suggested first funding a comprehensive non-partisan study into how voters were educated on the law ahead of the 2014 election season. Efforts should go to studying neighboring districts and how their representative races' were affected. Finally, they recommend annually tracking people's opinions on the law and subsequent elections as a way of finding if they were educated on voting requirements throughout the year.    

"Extending this case study as well as the study of the voter photo ID education endeavors (both past and current) beyond CD-23 will enrich the knowledge of what is occurring throughout Texas," researchers concluded. "Will we see similar patterns in other congressional districts, especially those with a large number of Latino registered voters?"