Even as the White House combusts in a spiritual fireball of overt lies, incoherent screeds, and novelty miniature Russian flags, the people who make up President Trump's newly-minted cabinet are busily planning the long-awaited implementation of their respective agendas. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a man whose checkered history of voter suppression is so damning that Mitch McConnell cravenly prevented Elizabeth Warren from even mentioning it on the Senate floor, will soon help quarterback the President's promised investigation into "voter fraud," a phrase I put in scare quotes because, again, no such problem exists.

What Department of Justice Lawyers Think About Working for Jeff Sessions Trump’s pick for attorney general has a formidable history of oppressing America’s most vulnerable.

One reason that plowing ahead with this farce is so dangerous—you know, besides the fact that the White House wants to spend taxpayer dollars to painstakingly deconstruct a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory—is that the primary policy weapon deployed against "voter fraud" are voter identification laws. These laws, which have been enacted by 33 state legislatures, are often criticized on the grounds that they disproportionately affect members of minority groups, whose comparatively reduced access to the requisite IDs prevents them from exercising their constitutional right to vote. A new study designed to test this theory yielded some pretty grim results, as detailed by the researchers in the Washington Post:

When we compare overall turnout in states with strict ID laws to turnout in states without these laws, we find no significant difference. That pattern matches with most existing studies. But when we dig deeper and look specifically at racial and ethnic minority turnout, we see a significant drop in minority participation when and where these laws are implemented.

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. Strict ID laws mean lower African American, Asian American and multiracial American turnout as well. White turnout is largely unaffected.

The report goes on to note that the turnout gap between white voters and minority voters increases significantly in states with strict voter ID laws, too.