People who failed to produce ID at the polls – who where they?

The elections just held were the first in which Michigan voters were required either to produce some sort of photo ID, or to fill out an affidavit stating they didn’t possess such ID.  The drafting of the requirement was so bad that it probably served more to irritate voters, than significantly impede them.  Still – inquiring minds demand – what were the characteristics of the people who failed to produce ID?

To begin to understand the effect of the law, I obtained all affidavits filed in the City of Lansing – 77 in all – and looked up their voting history and such information as my firm possesses about their affiliations.  There are a number of obvious limitations of this study:  it was only in Lansing, it examined a low-turnout election rather than a presidential general which would attract less-knowledgable voters, and the first experience may not fully predict the long-term effect.

Still, here’s what I found.

 
Grebner :: People who failed to produce ID at the polls – who where they?
In a word, the great majority of the people who filed affidavits were very good voters, not casual ones.  They were more likely to have voted in previous city council elections than the other people who voted last month.  They tended to be middle-aged, rather than young.  And they were overwhelmingly Democratic – something like 80% are coded on my file as Dems, compared to 10% ticket-splitters and 10% Republicans.  These folks do not appear to have been a random assortment of people who have lost or forgotten their wallets.

Of the nearly 11,000 people who cast ballots, 3700 used absentee ballots, so only about 7000 appeared at the polls on election day.  Of those, almost exactly 1% filled out affidavits saying they didn’t “possess” ID, and my guess is that between 2/3 and 3/4 of those were filed by people who were really trying to either test or protest the system.

Of the remaining fifteen or so, many were young or lacked a consistent history of voting.  Those people – about 0.2% of the total walk-in votes – represent the nucleus of concern.

Interestingly, there was no geographic clustering – affidavits were filed in 31 of Lansing’s 43 precincts.  That suggests there was no organized effort, but just the random result of a bunch of Democratic-leaning activists to challenge the law on their own.