I’ve been having a debate on the evidence supporting voter identification laws with Michael Thielen. First he wrote at Big Government and then at the blog of the Republican National Lawyers Association criticizing the released sneak preview chapter from my forthcoming book.

In his most recent post at the RNLA blog, I tried to post three comments. He allowed my first comment to be posted, but he has not posted my other comments, which responded to further comments he and another RNLA employee, Maya Noronha, made about my blog post.

The comments I wanted to post noted that the Pastor study could not have influenced the Carter-Baker report as it came out years after the Carter-Baker study concluded. Another commented defended the scholarship I relied upon in the book on the lack of evidence that voter id laws prevent impersonation fraud or increase voter confidence. Among the works I relied upon was the excellent Erikson-Minnite peer reviewed ELJ piece on voter id, which Thielen smears through character assassination. My comment also noted that Brad Friedman’s investigative work on the American Center for Voting Rights deserved to be credited in my chapter, but that Friedman comes in for criticism in the full version of the book to be released this summer.

But readers of the RNLA blog won’t know that I had responses to these arguments, because although RNLA purportedly opens its blog to comments, it sometimes chooses not to print them.

UPDATE: Thielen responds here. On not printing my comments even though they have an open link for comments: “The reason we don’t post his comments on our blog anymore (after the initial one we did post) is quite simple: we can’t post on his blog. So Professor Hasen, let us post on your blog and we will return the favor. But right now it is RNLA one, Election Law Blog zero.”

I’d be delighted to post a guest post from you, if you would ask.  I have often had guest posts from people with whom I strongly disagree. (Here’s a recent, prominent example.)  I don’t have comments on my blog because I run the blog alone, tried comments, and spent hours dealing with spam.  But I invite readers to email me comments and I occasionally quote them on my blog. It is not as though I have some kind of button inviting readers to post comments, and then I don’t post them.

On the substance, Thielen says I’m afraid to debate substance. My entire chapter shows that there is no credible evidence that voter identification laws are necessary to prevent impersonation voter fraud, or that voter id laws promote confidence. That latter point is amply proven in the Persily-Ansolabehere study (published in the Harvard Law Review). The Pastor study which Thielen cites goes only to the question of the prevalence of would-be voters without i.d.  I have some methodological issues with the study (other studies have found larger effects) but it is besides the point of my study.  It is worth noting that the Pastor report concludes: “Still, there are serious problems in the way in which the ID laws have been drafted or applied that might have the effect of reducing voter participation, particularly of certain groups”

Far from running away from a discussion of the merits, my chapter is a discussion of the merits.