This draft by Steve Ansolabehere and Nate Persily has moved to the top of my “to read” pile. It deals with a very important question that I discussed in my recent Stanford Law Review article: the lack of any social science evidence supporting the assumption made by the Supreme Court in the Purcell v. Gonzalez case that perceptions of voter fraud and lack of id requirements could undermine voters’ confidence in the electoral process and decrease voter turnout. Steve and Nate are among the best political scientists working in the area of election law, so I have high hopes for this piece. Here is the abstract:

In the current debate over the constitutionality of voter identification laws, both the Supreme Court and defenders of such laws have justified them, in part, as counteracting a widespread fear of voter fraud that leads citizens to disengage from the democracy. Because actual evidence of voter impersonation fraud is rare and difficult to come by if fraud is successful, reliance on public opinion as to the prevalence of fraud threatens to allow courts to evade the difficult task of balancing the actual constitutional risks involved. In this short Article we employ a unique survey to evaluate the causes and effects of public opinion regarding voter fraud. We find that perceptions of fraud have no relationship to an individual’s likelihood of turning out to vote. We also find that voters who were subject to stricter identification requirements believe fraud is just as widespread as do voters subject to less restrictive identification requirements.