State voter identification laws involve a potential tradeoff between the ease of voting and public perceptions of the integrity of elections. While several prior studies have examined the effects of voter ID laws on turnout, relatively few have investigated the effects of such laws on public confidence in the integrity of elections. These earlier efforts do not support the hypothesis that voter ID laws significantly improve common proxies for confidence in the integrity of elections. This study introduces a new survey instrument that directly measures confidence in the integrity of elections and employs this measure to estimate the within-state effects of changes in strict voter ID laws on confidence in the integrity of elections. In contrast to the findings of previous studies, strict voter ID requirements are shown to have a substantively large and statistically significant impact on the probability that citizens express confidence (and especially high confidence) in the integrity of elections.
Research Documents
NOTE: This is an incomplete draft of work in progress; please do not cite without permission.