Effect of voting restrictions seen

WASHINGTON — Fourteen states had new voting or registration restrictions in place for the 2016 presidential election, raising concerns that minority voters in particular would have a harder time accessing the ballot box.

Voting experts believe the laws had some effect on turnout this year, but said it would be difficult to measure against other factors — such as a lack of enthusiasm for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton and the decision of many people simply not to vote.

They expressed frustration that some states had made it more difficult for voters to participate, even if there is no evidence the changes influenced the outcome of the presidential election.

“There were clearly many people who bore the brunt of new voting restrictions or who were otherwise unable to participate, and that is not acceptable in a democracy,” said Wendy Weiser, head of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU’s School of Law.

She said a few battleground states won by Trump were among the states that had enacted restrictions in recent years, including Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

In some of the states, the margins between Trump and Clinton were simply too great for voting restrictions to have been a deciding factor. But Weiser said the roughly 27,000-vote difference in Wisconsin was concerning, given the turmoil surrounding the state’s voter ID law. With lower than expected turnout, Trump was the first Republican since Ronald Reagan in 1984 to win the state.

It’s been estimated that as many as 300,000 Wisconsin voters did not have the required photo ID. Molly McGrath, with the national group VoteRiders, spent Tuesday fielding dozens of calls from voters who had questions about the law.

In one case, she picked up a 99-year-old retired university professor named Fred at his polling place and drove him to a DMV office so he could get his photo ID. He had let his license expire, preferring instead to walk or ride his bike.