Voter ID Law Support Linked to Attitudes About African Americans, Study Finds

A new study has found that support for voter ID laws, especially among those who lean Democratic, is linked to one’s feelings toward African Americans.

In the study, conducted by the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication, respondents were asked several questions, and their answers were used to create a spectrum of “racial resentment.” The more resentment a person conveyed, the more likely they were to support voter ID laws.

Voter ID laws require people to show some form of government identification before they can cast a ballot. {snip}

Black, Latino, low-income and younger voters are all less likely to have official government identification — and are all also more likely to vote for Democrats.

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Those who identified as Republicans or conservatives have the highest score on the measure of racial resentment. But self-identified Republicans and conservatives favor the laws regardless of where they fell on resentment matrix. It was those respondents who identified as Democrats and liberals whose stances were most likely to be informed by racial resentment.

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