While the study — which reported that the law resulted in "significant decline in turnout" — drew attention nationally, the R.I. secretary of state's office says the report focuses only on driver's license IDs, not other acceptable forms of identification.

CLARIFICATION: The original version of this post may have implied that the National Bureau of Economic Research study cited was peer-reviewed before being distributed. In fact, the bureau says it releases studies at an earlier stage so that professionals and the public can comment on them.

Opponents of Rhode Island's eight-year-old voter ID law cheered this week when research showing the law stifled voting by low-income residents appeared to confirm their long-held fears.

The study from Brown University academics distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research [NBER] found that the photo ID law passed in 2011 and used for the first time in 2014 resulted in a "significant decline in turnout, registration, and voting conditional on registration (for more vulnerable groups of voters) in presidential elections after the law was implemented."

After making the rounds among national election law watchers Monday, the study was cited in a General Assembly press release Wednesday promoting Sen. Gayle Goldin's package of voting reform bills, including one to repeal the voter ID law.

But while the paper drew attention nationally, some Rhode Island officials closely connected with the voting rights push and the group that wrote it were mostly quiet about it.

This includes Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea, a longtime critic of the voter ID law who promised as a candidate in 2014 to study its effects on voter turnout and in early 2017 began working with the group then known as the Rhode Island Innovative Policy Lab [RIPL]. The group is now called Research Improving People's Lives.

Before the private nonprofit NBER published it, Gorbea's staff saw the results of the RIPL voter ID study in September 2017.

But they had questions the researchers apparently never answered.

"Unfortunately, their study only compared Rhode Islanders with a RI driver’s license and those without. It did not include Rhode Islanders who have other IDs acceptable for voting, such as State IDs, student IDs, military ID cards, U.S. Passports, Tribal IDs or the Voter ID cards issued by our office," said Nicole Legace, Gorbea's communications director. "Because the study did not include other forms of ID that are acceptable for voting, such as student IDs or state IDs, we felt the methodology was incomplete."

As it happens, the secretary of state's office has issued 2,300 voter ID cards since 2014.

The DMV issues 15,000 non-driver's identification cards each year and counts 73,077 currently active IDs, according to spokesman Paul Grimaldi.

While Gorbea isn't promoting the study, Legace said the findings that the ID law discouraged younger voters prompted the secretary of state's office to focus voter outreach on young people in 2018.



Some more facts about the study, conducted by Justine Hastings and Francesco Maria Esposito of Brown with Diego Focanti of RIPL.

It used state elections and administrative records with personally identifying information removed to compare the voting behavior of Rhode Islanders with driver's licenses to those without between two sets of elections: the midterms in 2010 and 2014, and the presidential elections in 2012 and 2016.

The central finding was that in 2016 there was a 7.6 percentage point drop in voter registration and 2.7 percentage point drop in turnout from what the researchers think it would have been without the voter ID law.

Actual voter turnout was 450,030 people in 2012 and 469,589 in 2016, according to secretary of state figures.

"These estimates imply that overall votes declined by 0.42 percentage points as a result of the law," the study said.

For whatever reason, the downward pressure of the law did not appear in mid-term years, according to the results. (Actual turnout in 2010 was 345,878 and in 2014 it was 329,233.)

Other findings:

— Rhode Islanders with a history of voting were no more likely to get a driver's license after the voter ID law passed than before it.

— Declines in voter turnout in the districts of state lawmakers who opposed the voter ID law were larger than in districts represented by lawmakers who supported it, which "suggests legislators forecast, and considered the potential effects on their constituencies when voting on the law."

— The post voter ID elections did not result in a spike in voting by mail, which can be done without a photo ID.

Who is Research Improving People's Lives?

The group was founded by Hastings, an economist, in 2015 after the Laura and John Arnold Foundation "reached out" to "explore the possibility of scaling the type of high-impact rigorous research she is known for," according to the RIPL website.

The Arnold Foundation's founders, billionaire former Enron trader and hedge fund manager John Arnold and his wife Laura, have donated a combined $66,000 to Gov. Gina Raimondo, her political action committee and the Rhode Island Democratic Party since 2012. The Foundation donated $100,000 to a pro-Raimondo Super PAC to support her run for governor and was a significant backer of Engage RI, the shadowy group that campaigned for Raimondo's 2011 state pension cut plan.

Hastings could not be reached last week and questions forwarded to her via Brown staff went unanswered.

Raimondo spokesman Josh Block said the governor played no part in the formation of RIPL and her office is not currently working with the group, even though she is mentioned prominently on the "Our Story" page of its website.

"Under the leadership of Governor Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island government is focused on 'making government more responsive to the people it serves' by focusing on 'problem solving, implementing innovative solutions, and improving agency performance and outcomes," the RIPL website says while linking to a 2016 press release from the governor's office. "After establishing our partnership with the Governor’s Office, we got to work right away building partnerships with agencies, developing our process, understanding their needs, and building an outstanding team of computer scientists, economists, behavioral scientists, and policy analysts."

Does Raimondo think Rhode Island should repeal its voter ID law?

"She is opposed to voter ID laws, which create an additional barrier to voting,” Block wrote in an email.

Costantino won't

pursue complaint

State Rep. Gregory Costantino does not intend to pursue his police complaint against a perceived threat, to him personally, in the testimony that women's-issues activist Melanie DuPont delivered to the House Judiciary Committee, during a recent hearing on abortion rights.

In her testimony, DuPont, the secretary of the Rhode Island Democratic Party Women’s Caucus, said this of Costantino, a Lincoln Democrat who co-sponsored one of the anti-abortion bills on the agenda:

“A vital part of the Mission of the Women’s Caucus, is to ensure gender equality in our laws. ... Therefore I contend that, any time my State Representative, Gregory J. Costantino, tries to abridge my rights as a woman, and endanger my life, I, Melanie DuPont, should return the favor, and try to abridge his rights as a man, and endanger his life.”

She followed that with a suggested amendment to Costantino's anti-abortion bill titled “the Testicular Fairness Act'' to make sure "men receive suboptimal medical care, risk infection and death, and have their reproductive choices overridden by the State."

She called it satire. He called the state police to report her words. They talked to DuPont. Based on what the state police subsequently told him, Constantino told Political Scene: "They did speak to her and I was satisfied with that."

Satisfied there was no real threat? "Correct,'' said Costantino, who still does not view "that one sentence that says 'I am going to endanger his life' " as satire.

R.I.P. Moderate Party

On Tuesday night, Feb. 5, 2019: the Rhode Island Moderate Party was officially declared dead.

By unanimous vote, the R.I. Board of Elections removed the "Moderate Party" that software entrepreneur and two-time candidate for governor Ken Block founded — before bolting for the GOP — as a recognized party.

Under state law, the party needed 5 percent of the overall votes cast in the governor's race to stay alive.

Unable to recruit any other candidate to carry the torch, Moderate Party Chairman William Gilbert ran himself last year, getting only 2.7 percent in a multi-candidate race that the incumbent, Democrat Gina Raimondo, won with 52.6 percent of the vote.

Now comes the task of notifying every one of the 4,031 registered "'Moderate Party'' voters that they are now "unaffiliated."

Robert Rapoza, the BOE's executive director, was in the process last week of sending emails to election officials in all 39 cities and towns, advising them to run reports to identify all of the registered "Moderates" in their communities and then send letters notifying each of those voters that their party affiliation has been changed from "Moderate" to "unaffiliated." Each envelope will also contain a voter-registration form in the event for those who wish to re-register as a Republican or Democrat.

No one from the Moderate Party came to Tuesday night's BOE meeting to protest or mourn the passing of a recognized third party that reached its height in 2014 when the late Robert Healey — best known as the founder of the Cool Moose Party — ran for governor under the Moderate banner, and snagged 21.4 percent of the vote.