If voter ID laws were created to suppress minority voting, they're actually not doing that http://reason.com/blog/2015/07/17/voter-id-suppression-fail "This was a racist attack on our sacred right to vote," North Carolina NAACP President Rev. William Barber declared earlier this week. Barber was denouncing some recent changes to North Carolina's election laws, which are being challenged in the federal court case NAACP vs. McCrory. The changes, Barber said, are "the worst voter suppression law we've seen since the 1960s." Among other things, the new North Carolina law eliminated same-day voter registration, cut back early voting, and ended pre-registration of eligible high school students. But the main objection to the changes involves the requirement that voters show photo identification at polling places. In its brief, the NAACP argues that African Americans are "disproportionately" affected by this requirement. The brief also claims that the new laws were "enacted with the intention of suppressing the number of votes cast by African-Americans." My general view is that voting should be made easier, although as we'll see, there is precious little evidence that it makes any significant difference in electoral results. I also don't have much regard for the idea that we need tighter voter ID laws to prevent voter fraud, since most research shows that voter-impersonation fraud is extremely rare. But if the intent of the new laws really is to suppress minority group voting, it's not likely to work. There has been a lot of academic research recently on the effects of stricter voter ID requirements, and—contrary to Barber's apocalyptic statements—they don't seem to have much of an impact on minority turnout at all. Take "The Politics of Race and Voter ID Laws in the States: The Return of Jim Crow?," a 2013 study published in the Political Research Quarterly. In it, political scientists Rene Rocha and Tetsuya Matsubayashi find that states in which Republicans hold a majority in the legislature and the governorship are more likely to adopt strict voter ID laws. (And so it was in North Carolina when the new laws were adopted.) Then they look at how changes in electoral rules may have affected voter turnout by comparing election results before and after voter ID law changes in 49 states between 1980 and 2010. "Our primary explanatory variables, photo ID and nonphoto ID laws, have no statistically discernible relationship with the probability that whites, blacks, and Latinos voted in the general elections between 1980 and 2010 except that the nonphoto ID law has a positive and significant relationship with Latino turnout," they find. "In short, more stringent ID requirements for voting have no deterring effect on individual turnout across different racial and ethnic groups." (More at above url) Note: I live in North Carolina and we regularly endure the antics of North Carolina NAACP President Rev. Barber quoted in the first paragraph.. IMO he continually stirs the racial pot for his personal benefit. He also needs to stay away from the buffet line.