Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, has released some very interesting statistics that disprove — once again — the fallacious claims made by critics of voter ID. Kansas, whose voter-ID law became effective this year, has 1.8 million registered voters. From January 1 through September 30, only 120 people in the entire state applied for the free ID that Kansas provides to anyone who doesn’t already have a photo ID.
Those 120 constitute only 0.007 percent of all voters registered in Kansas.
On Election Day, only 0.07 percent of the 1,182,771 Kansans turning out at the polls were unable to show a proper form of identification. They were allowed to cast provisional ballots and told to present a valid ID after the election so that their vote would be counted. Almost half of the provisional voters did so, dropping the number of voters without proper ID to just 0.04 percent of all people who tried to cast votes.
These figures give the lie to claims by the Brennan Center and other voter ID opponents that a whopping 11 percent of voting-age Americans have no acceptable form of photo ID, and that voter-ID laws therefore present a hindrance for many.
In an election where turnout across the country generally went down from 2008, Kansas had a turnout of 66.8 percent. That’s virtually the same as the turnout in 2000 (66.7 percent) — the last presidential election year in which Kansas had no U.S. Senate race. Sorry, Brennan Center. Your claim that voter ID laws reduce turnout goes up in smoke. Again.
