Walter Olson, in a recent post for the Cato Institute, writes about a study of the effects of changes in voting laws on turnout and on partisan performance. It turns out that changes in voting laws have virtually no effect one way or the other.
“That goes for (to name a few) the availability of mail and lockbox voting as an alternative to in‐person Election Day voting, voter registration through motor vehicles offices, and the dropping of inactive voters from registration rolls,” Olson writes. It’s also true of voter-ID laws, which Democrats say will be used to suppress votes, and of felon-enfranchisement laws that Republicans say will help Democrats. The study is by political scientists Justin Grimmer of Stanford University and Eitan Hersh of Tufts University.
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