Objective Evidence Found That Voter ID Law Support is Racially-Motivated

[True Blue Door]

"To test bias among state legislators, Grose and Mendez developed a pioneering field experiment. In the two weeks leading to the Nov. 4, 2012 general election, they sent e-mails to 1,871 state legislators in 14 states with the largest Latino populations in the U.S. The e-mails read as follows:

Hello (Representative/Senator NAME),

My name is (voter NAME) and I have heard a lot in the news lately about identification being required at the polls. I do not have a driver's license. Can I still vote in November? Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,
(voter NAME)

Grose and Mendez sent one group of legislators the e-mail from a fictional voter they named "Jacob Smith." The other group received it from fictional voter "Santiago Rodriguez." In each group, half the legislators received e-mails written in Spanish, while half received e-mails in English.

The study was designed so none of the states included required driving licenses in order to vote. This meant legislators could theoretically have responded to the e-mails with a simple "yes."

The results showed that lawmakers who had supported voter ID requirements were much more likely to respond to "Jacob Smith" than to "Santiago Rodriguez," thereby revealing a preference for responding to constituents with Anglophone names over constituents with Hispanic ones. They also showed legislators were more likely to respond to English than Spanish-language constituents.

Among voter ID supporters, the responsiveness to Latino constituents was dramatically lower than to Anglo constituents. Even within the Spanish language constituents' requests, the Spanish speaker with an Anglo name was responded to nine percentage points more than a Spanish speaker with a Latino name. The latter received virtually no response from the voter ID supporters, with a response rate of just one percent.

Among both Republican and Democrat lawmakers who do not support voter ID, Spanish-language constituents with both Anglo and Spanish surnames received almost the same rate of response at around 12 percent, with no statistical difference in preference for the Anglophone or Hispanic name, Mendez said."

http://phys.org/news/2014-07-state-legislators-favor-voter-id.html

Who would have thought that radical measures implemented to prevent a nonexistent problem with illegal voting were actually attempts to limit minority voting? Well, everyone other than the supporters of the perpetrators. Now we have proof.

The racist trash of the GOP should be on notice: Vote suppression is treason.

[BumRushDaShow]

1. It'll only be a matter of time

before Ted Cruz's and Marco Rubio's children face the wrath of the party that they belong to - all because of their surnames.

[BumRushDaShow]

5. The fact that it happens at all

only underscores the continued prejudice in the institution - also notably against AAs, where people with names like "LaKeisha" or "DeShawn" pay a price vs someone named "Mary".

[True Blue Door]

10. Riiiiiight.

The fact that politicians strongly associated with a policy that discriminates against Latinos prefer not to answer communications from Latino-sounding names about voting rights is surely a result of...cosmic rays. I'll bet the study's author didn't even control for seismic activity, so plate tectonics could be involved!

[BumRushDaShow]

13. Bzzt. Sorry wrong answer.

There is WAY too much data on racial and ethnic profiling in every activity that one might engage in (voting, job hunting, house or apartment-hunting, walking into a high-end or any other type of store, walking down the street, driving a car, attending school, etc).

[BumRushDaShow]

23. I'm sure the perpertrators of the bias

would consider it "controversial" but the study is a tool in the toolbox needed to re-establish Sects. 4 & 5 the Voting Rights Act. "Experiencing discrimination" is part of the "historical" pile-on that is often cited in court and the Voting Rights Act was intended to address "historical" prejudices. In fact, the study underscores this infamous ditty uttered by the Majority leader ass right here in PA from back in 2012 -

[True Blue Door]

7. That should be the GOP's new slogan: "Not racist, just correlated with racism."

[True Blue Door]

11. Nine percentage points is MASSIVE.

The study's author is a USC political science professor, not some undergrad Latino Studies major. Your comment is really obtuse.

[BumRushDaShow]

15. Why are you trying to justify anything except what it is? nt

[BumRushDaShow]

20. As a scientist

I disagree. It was designed to target the responses of almost two thousand state legislators who met a specified set of criteria (live in a state that doesn't have a Voter ID law and has a large Hispanic constituency) and compare a "control group" (those who do not support Voter ID laws) with another "control group" (those who do support Voter ID laws), who were given the same email content save for the language for which the messages were written. And then all they had to do was sit back and wait to tabulate the responses. The key being the bolded part -

The results showed that lawmakers who had supported voter ID requirements were much more likely to respond to "Jacob Smith" than to "Santiago Rodriguez," thereby revealing a preference for responding to constituents with Anglophone names over constituents with Hispanic ones. They also showed legislators were more likely to respond to English than Spanish-language constituents.

Among voter ID supporters, the responsiveness to Latino constituents was dramatically lower than to Anglo constituents. Even within the Spanish language constituents' requests, the Spanish speaker with an Anglo name was responded to nine percentage points more than a Spanish speaker with a Latino name. The latter received virtually no response from the voter ID supporters, with a response rate of just one percent.

Among both Republican and Democrat lawmakers who do not support voter ID, Spanish-language constituents with both Anglo and Spanish surnames received almost the same rate of response at around 12 percent, with no statistical difference in preference for the Anglophone or Hispanic name, Mendez said.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-07-state-legislators-favor-voter-id.html#jCp

Sorry if you can't see the bias.

[BumRushDaShow]

24. Then we can agree to disagree

Some can't see the young woman and some can't see the old woman in this time-worn image test of perception -

[True Blue Door]

19. In other words, you'd rather call a USC professor incompetent

with no basis for doing so rather than acknowledge the likelihood that the study means exactly what it appears to mean.

[BumRushDaShow]

25. The results confirm a bias

the sampling pool was done to limit the study author's potential biases.

If what you assert were true, then the emails would have only been sent to legislators who not only promoted Voter ID laws but were elected in states that had Voter ID laws in effect. They would have also only selected legislators that were primarily or only of one party - the one known to be more supportive of Voter ID laws. This is why the study got some attention because it was selective in terms of filtering out possible other reasons why the data might not show what they theorized. I.e., it wasn't so much "party affiliation" as it was whether the person supported Voter ID or not and whether they felt such applied to one "group" more than another.

The fact that those who were NOT supporters of Voter ID laws from either party, yet DID respond to these sorts of emails and did so at the same rate, is significant.

[Quantess]

3. How can anyone know whether the results were actually due to english vs. spanish?

I think the language the emails were written has got to be a big factor.

[Jackpine Radical]

26. The study was designed to unconfound any such potential effect.

It was a simple 2x2 cell design in which there were two fictional voters, one with a Spanish name and one with an Anglo name and letters in both languages. Half of the letters were written in each language. Half the Spanish-language letters were from the Anglo-named "voter," and half from the Hispanic-named "voter." Thus 1/4 of the letters were from the "Anglo" writing in Spanish, 1/4 from the Hispanic writing in English, 1/4 from the "Anglo" writing in English, and 1/4 from the "Hispanic" writing in Spanish. In this design it is very easy to test for the separate effects of name ethnicity and language.

[ananda]

8. Wow. My first thought: the obvious needs a study?

..

[Lee-Lee]

14. While I know it's true anyway, the study could still be flawed

I happen to know for a fact that the staffers and even the officeholders at state level here in NC often check voter registration records before choosing how and if to respond to an email or anything else- with limited resources at hand they don't want to use them on people who are not voters in their district. They may still, respond, depending on the issue, but it is less likely.

Heck I even had a city council member, a staunch progressive, respond to an email from me asking first if I lived on the city because my name wasn't on the voter rolls there.

"Jacob Smith" is a name generic enough to be found in every legislative district. "Santiago Rodriguez" much less so. The methodology would have been more sound had they picked names with statistically similar occurrence in the voter pool.

[Jackpine Radical]

27. But those potential confounding effects would presumably be

equally distributed between the 2 groups of politicians.

[Gothmog]

18. The USC study is a good study

There is clear racial bias on the part of the legislators adopting these laws. This study has not yet been used in the voter id litigation and the authors of this study is not on with witness list for the upcoming Texas voter id trial. I am not sure that this study would be that useful in the litigation but this study does confirm the motivations of the legislators adopting these laws.

There is another another study that is even better on this where it is shown that the only states which have adopted these voter id laws are states where there is a republican governor and where the percentage of minority vote has been increasing. There is a clear political motivation to these laws.

[redqueen]

28. Thanks to Gothmog and Jackpine Radical for their contributions to this thread.

K&R

[dembotoz]

29. this is important stuff k and r