NPR reports “Why New Photo ID Laws Mean Some Won’t Vote.”  While this is an interesting report on who doesn’t have voter id and on how the data skew, it is really incomplete.  This is what we need to know to understand how new i.d. requirements may affect upcoming elections:

1. how many people don’t have i.d. now and how do those data skew?

2. of those people who don’t have i.d.

a. how many want but cannot get the i.d. needed to vote (either because the documents needed for the i.d. are not (easily) available or affordable, for religious reasons, or some other reason)?; and

b. of those people, how many would vote, but for the lack of a voter i.d.? and

c. of those people lacking i.d. who want to vote, how many may vote without i.d., either through an absentee ballot, with an affidavit or witness statement, or through some other means?

In short, knowing how many people don’t have i.d. now is the beginning, not the end, of the inquiry about how voter i.d. laws will affect the outcome of elections.  I have yet to see good data on these final questions.  The best analyses I have seen so far on this question are Pitts and Neumann and Erikson and Minnite [fixed link]. Both show we are a long way from being able to answer these questions, though there is reason to believe the numbers of people actually deterred by voter i.d. requirements likely are not enormous.

Much more on this in The Voting Wars.