The Independent View: Texas Discouraged More Voters Than Those Without Voter ID

Texas’ strict voter identification requirements kept many would-be voters in a Hispanic-majority congressional district from going to the polls last November, including many who had proper IDs, a new survey shows. And the state's voter ID law, coupled with lackluster voter education efforts, might have shaped the outcome of a congressional race, the research suggests.

Released on Thursday, the 50th anniversary of the Federal Voting Rights Act, the joint Rice University and University of Houston study found that 13 percent of those registered in the 23rd Congressional District stayed home, at least partly because they thought they lacked proper ID under a state law considered the strictest in the nation. 6% did not vote primarily because of the requirements.

But most of those discouraged Texans had the proper documents to vote, says the study, which came one day after a Federal appeals court ruled that the four-year-old Texas law has a “discriminatory effect” on Hispanics and African-Americans.

The researchers surveyed 400 people who registered but did not vote in the 29-county district, which stretches from San Antonio to El Paso and along a large slice of the Texas-Mexico border. The study found that less than 3 percent lacked proper identification during November's election. "The voter ID law depressed turnout in the 2014 election, but it did so primarily through confusion, not through actually keeping people without IDs from voting,” said Mark P. Jones, a professor at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and an author of the study.

The new study suggests that the state’s effort to educate voters about the requirement, which included postings on the Secretary of State’s website, fell flat.
“It was a very limited education campaign in CD-23,” Jones said. “Most voters who are confused by the voter ID law don’t regularly go to the Secretary of State’s website to see what’s new.”

The Secretary of State's office took issue with that description, saying it spent $2 million on voter education efforts statewide on radio, television and print advertising among other outreach efforts.

But Democrats and other outspoken opponents of the law may have also contributed to the problem, seeing their criticism boomerang into confusion for would-be voters, Jones added. “If the message they received was that there’s this new strict voter ID law, but they didn’t receive the second part, of what the several forms of ID are, that may have caused part of the problem,” he said.

Researchers focused on CD-23 largely because of its demographics and the neck-in-neck congressional race it held. CD-23 is seen as the state's only U.S. House district that's competitive between Republicans and Democrats. Roughly two-thirds of the voting age population is Hispanic.