Trip Gabriel and Manny Fernandez write for the NYT. A snippet:
Voting rights advocates raised eyebrows about the role of voting restrictions in races that were narrowly decided. Wendy Weiser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which has challenged voting restrictions in court, said that in some key races, Republicans won tight victories that were close to what she called the “margin of disenfranchisement.”
In North Carolina, Ms. Weiser noted, 200,000 voters cast ballots over seven days of early voting in 2010 – a window used especially by African-Americans – that was eliminated this year. Thom Tillis, a Republican, defeated Senator Kay Hagen by just 48,000 votes.
Similarly, Ms. Weiser pointed to Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, was re-elected by fewer than 33,000 votes, or 2.8 percent. At the same time, 22,000 would-be voters, whose registrations were suspended for lack of a document to prove their citizenship, did not get to cast a ballot. Kansas also has a strict voter ID law, which a federal government study this year said suppressed turnout by about 2 percent. It had a greater impact on young and black voters.
“These laws should give us pause,” Ms. Weiser said. “They’re creating disenfranchisement. We have enough information to gauge what the order of magnitude is, and it’s close to the order of magnitude of the margins of victory.”
But Kansas’s secretary of state, Kris W. Kobach, who wrote the law requiring proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote, dismissed the suggestion that it played a role in suppressing turnout. “Voter turnout in the November 2014 election was 50 percent, exactly what it was in the November 2010 election before we adopted our photo ID law — also 50 percent,” he said.
Ms. Weiser said she was not implying that any of last week’s victories were illegitimate, but other commentators, especially on the left, have not been so restrained, implying that voter requirement laws are already deciding elections.
But there are problems in leaping to such conclusions, voting experts said. In North Carolina, despite the elimination of seven days of early voting, overall early voting was up by 35 percent compared with 2010, according to the United States Election Project at the University of Florida.