When you dig into the studies you find how tenuous the data support voter suppression is.
First, you have to look at the big picture. Voter participation of blacks has been steadily rising over the last 20 year and is nearly identical to whites, in most elections and exceeded it (e.g. 2008 election for Obama) in some. This is the same time period when things like voter ID laws became more popular, so if you want to conclude that Republicans were trying to suppress black voters that’s a perfectly logical conclusion. Given the overall trends in voter participation among blacks, it is a pretty high bar to prove that Republican efforts were successful.
Another important trend is that ballot access is improving in the country, vote by mail, no excuse absentee, early voting. The purple west is a leader in this and the blue northeast is the laggard, with the red, South and Midwest being between. The last few elections have seen record turnouts, which goes against the voter suppression narrative.
Here is the thing, it is not that hard to measure the impact of these new laws on voter turnout. Voter records are public records, and academic researchers have pretty easy access to them. One of the complaints about the Georgia law was that it reduce the number of ballot drop-off boxes. So if Steve Smith of 100 E Main st, Macon, Georgia voted in 2018 and didn’t vote in 2022 and he lived in the neighborhood that eliminated dropboxes. You send a pollster to ask Steve why he did not vote. If says, I would have voted but they eliminate a dropbox in my neighborhood, and a higher percentage of black than white say eliminating dropbox, caused me to not vote, while there is your proof. Hell, with enough money, they could talk to every non-voter in the state. Let’s see how many of them say, reducing the number of early voting days kept me from voting, or my personal favorite. "I would have voted but I didn’t want to wait in the long lines, cause nobody could give me water in the hot sun. Mind you all Federal elections are held mid-November, where far is more like to be feezing than over 100.
The Democrats spent 1.3 billion dollars on the Georgia Senate and Governor race. As I’m sure @triggercut will attest if you spent say 5% aka $65 million you could do a helluva of a lot of polling in Georgia among registered non-voters.
But somehow none of the academic research, ever simply asks non-voters why they don’t vote. Instead, they do convoluted studies they look at RID Reasonable Impediments Declaration” and try and make predictions on elections based on demographics.
The cynic in me says Democrats don’t actually want to know this information because railing against vote laws is such a great fundraiser. As Sharpe points out the numbers are just too small. The Republicans typically can find 1/2 dozen cases of attempted voter fraud (ironically almost always Republicans) in a state, and I suspect If the Democrats really looked they could find maybe hundreds of cases of folks who didn’t vote cause of these laws. It ain’t enough to change an election.
Not voting because you couldn’t get to dropbox, ignores the much simpler process of putting the ballot in the mail, or getting your butt down to the polling place during early voting or election day. Oh and if you don’t have transportation, every party has volunteers who will happily drive somebody to a polling place.
Likewise, if you can’t get your act together to get a free state id, which will make your life much easier for a dozen of tasks, especially if you are a homeless person being hassled by the cops, you have much bigger problems in life than not voting. It is disingenuous to claim that these folks would be voting in numbers big enough to impact an election but for getting an id.
I’m going out on a limb here and predict black voter turnout will decrease in 2024 if Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot. It will have virtually nothing to do with election laws, and everything to do with the candidates.
