Typically, analysts examining how voter ID laws affect turnout have honed in on voters who lack ID as the obvious victims of such a law. The Rice/Houston study, however, reveals that these laws reach far beyond the universe of people without IDs. “[T]he most significant impact of the Texas voter photo ID law on voter participation,” at least within the congressional district examined by the study, “was to discourage turnout among registered voters who did indeed possess an approved form of photo ID, but through some combination of misunderstanding, doubt or lack of knowledge, believed that they did not possess the necessary photo identification.” [...] Altogether, 12.8 percent of the non-voters surveyed in the study said that lack of identification was a reason why they did not vote in the 2014 election, and 5.8 percent said that this was the principal reason why they did not vote. Yet, despite the relatively high numbers of voters who cited lack of ID when asked why they did not cast a ballot, the researchers determined that only “2.7% of the respondents did not possess any of the seven valid forms of photo identification” and “only 1.0% did not possess a photo ID and agreed that a lack of this photo ID was a reason why they did not vote.” At best, this suggests that more than half of the voters who did not cast a ballot because they believed they lacked the identification required to do so actually did have a valid form of ID.

Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress reports on a study that found a hefty percentage of eligible voters in House district 23 of Texas didn't cast ballots in 2014 because they didn't have, or didn't think they had, the proper ID to vote. If they had voted, it might well have turned the tide in the race between Democrat Pete Gallego and Republican Will Hurd because the vote was so close:The study concluded that more people who stayed away were likely to have voted for Gallego, then a freshman incumbent, than for Hurd. It also found that Latino non-voters were much more likely than Anglo non-voters to say that lack of photo ID was the reason they didn't vote in 2014. The population of the district is more than half Latino.

The Texas voter ID law was blocked under Section 5 of the Voter Rights Act until the Supreme Court gutted the act. But last week a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out the voter ID law on the grounds that it "violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act through its discriminatory effect."

The study—"The Texas Voter Photo ID Law and the 2014 Election: A Study of Texas’s Congressional District 23” can be found here.