Hillary Rodham Clinton and her Democratic allies are shining a bright light on voter ID laws and other perceived roadblocks to the ballot box, yet drawing a straight line from laws designed to crack down on fraud to low turnout in a single contest is notably difficult, analysts say, and data on the most recent elections tend to lag behind the fast-moving debate.
Individual contests, the amount of time and money spent on each campaign and the weather can be major factors in how many people show up at the polls on Election Day, clouding a debate that has roiled courts and kicked up dust among progressives who say minorities and the poor have been disenfranchised.
Many analysts point to a Government Accountability Office study that found turnout dropped by roughly 2 percent in Kansas and Tennessee from the 2008 to the 2012 contests, compared with states that didn’t change their voter ID laws. Yet analysts say the record of impartial studies is limited, and researchers are still breaking down November’s midterm contests.
