D'oh! It was the Democrats' holy grail: A major study showing voter ID laws disenfranchise minority voters and skew election results to the right.

The problem? The findings are complete garbage, according to a follow-up study from researchers at Stanford, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.

Findings from the original study, released Jan. 5, were cited heavily by the mainstream media and the left, including the Washington Post.

The leftist blog Think Progress ran the headline: "New study confirms that voter ID laws are very racist."

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Media Matters, the far-left organization that monitors media, declared: "New study debunks right-wing lies, proves voter ID laws suppress minority votes."

The January study was conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, Michigan State University and Bucknell University. It examined voter ID data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies collected from 2006 to 2014.

The study's authors concluded: "The analysis shows that strict identification laws have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of racial and ethnic minorities in primaries and general elections. We also find that voter ID laws skew democracy toward those on the political right."

In fact, the researchers claimed, voter ID laws negatively impact Hispanics more than other demographics.

"Hispanics are affected the most: Turnout is 7.1 percentage points lower in general elections and 5.3 points lower in primaries in strict ID states than it is in other states," they wrote in the Washington Post. "Strict ID laws mean lower African American, Asian American and multiracial American turnout as well. White turnout is largely unaffected."

But a follow-up study published March 10 shows the findings the left so enthusiastically embraced are complete nonsense.

"[T]he original study was based on surveys of voters that are extremely unreliable — skewing the results," wrote German Lopez at the left-leaning blog Vox.com. "On top of that, several calculation errors led to even more problems. When the errors are corrected, the follow-up researchers found, there's no evidence in the analyzed data that voter ID laws have a statistically significant impact on voter turnout."

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Some of the biggest problems with the original study include:

The researchers used notoriously unreliable data that could distort findings. The new study explained: "In the 2006 CCES, the estimated turnout rate was 10 points below actual turnout in 15 states, most of which showed practically zero turnout according to the CCES. Virginia had almost no validated voters in 2008, as well. Given the error in the 2006 study, that year is not suitable for use in the analysis, nor are Virginia’s records from 2008. But [the researchers] include these data in their analysis."

It didn't account for other variables that may have led to the results. Vox explained: "The follow-up replication 'suggest[s] that turnout is about 6 percentage points lower in places that will adopt a strict ID law' — meaning that the model picked up an effect on voter turnout before a state actually passed a voter ID law, suggesting that it’s picking up something else that is correlated with but not caused by voter ID laws."

There were miscalculations, misreadings of data and other mistakes found in the original study.

In the follow-up study, researchers corrected flaws in the original analysis and found: "The effect for whites is positive, but only statistically significant in primaries. The effect for Latinos is sometimes positive, sometimes negative, and generally not significant."

The new analysis states: "Strict voter ID laws may reduce turnout, particularly among minorities, but the evidence presented in [the original study] does not constitute reliable information documenting such a relationship."

The left's most common argument is that voter ID laws would disenfranchise certain groups of people, including racial minorities, the poor and younger voters.

But Daniel Horowitz, a senior editor at Conservative Review, told WND in July 2016 that he believes it's an example of the left's tendency to twist the concept of rights in order to grant special privileges to protected classes of individuals at the expense of the rest of the population.

“They’re basically saying that there is a mandate, a right for an individual to vote fraudulently and thereby strip rights away from everyone else,” Horowitz told WND.

He said attacks on such laws are part of the leftist effort to disenfranchise Americans who have a legitimate right to vote.

"It ties in to the general sense of them refusing to adopt basic bedrock regulations to illegal immigrants voting, having illegal immigrants come here and getting citizenship for their children," Horowitz said. "It's a disenfranchising of the public, diluting what it means to be an American. Diluting the franchise really undercuts the guaranteed liberty that we all have to vote in elections.”

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Horowitz noted the irony of the left's unwillingness to support voter ID regulations.

"It's funny, for a group of people who want to regulate every activity of our lives over and beyond the enumerated powers granted to the federal government or even state governments, the one thing that they don’t want to do is something that the government is absolutely required to do, and that’s to protect the franchise," Horowitz said.

Horowitz pointed out that people are required to show ID for such mundane things as cashing a check, boarding an airplane or Amtrak train, buying liquor and buying certain over-the-counter drugs. Therefore, if someone had trouble producing a valid photo ID, they would run into problems on a regular basis, not just at election time.

Horowitz sees through all the fretting about discrimination to what he believes is the real reason the left seeks to strike down voter ID laws.

"They are basically saying openly that they want fraudulent voting and that fraudulent voting benefits Democrats," Horowitz said. "They’re openly saying that, because there’s no logical reason you wouldn’t want to have a simple bar to fraudulent voting."

As WND reported, experts on vote fraud argue mass fraud happens at the point of registration, before a vote is cast. The states that require residents to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, when they register to vote are Alabama, Arizona, Georgia and Kansas, all of which backed Trump in November.