The Biden administration appears poised to put the government’s thumb on the scale in the 2024 election, House Republicans say.
The administration’s lack of transparency about implementing President Joe Biden’s executive order for federal agencies to help get out the vote—combined with a warning from Attorney General Merrick Garland—has sparked some concern among lawmakers.
“You just saw Merrick Garland saying voter ID is disenfranchising people,” Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., co-chairman of the House Election Integrity Caucus, told The Daily Signal. “The statistics don’t bear that out. It’s like 85% of people across all demographics support voter ID.”
Earlier this month, Garland criticized voter ID laws and other election security measures as “discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary.”
“One of the first things I did as attorney general was to double the number of lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division,” Garland said in a March 3 speech in Selma, Alabama. “That is why we are challenging efforts by states and jurisdictions to implement discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes, and voter ID requirements.”
As explained in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” several studies have shown that voter ID laws don’t suppress voting.
A 2019 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, based on turnout data from 2008 to 2018, said voter ID laws “have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.”
A 2023 study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that voter ID laws actually “produced a Democratic advantage, which weakened to near zero after 2012.” It added that voter ID laws have “negligible average effects.”
