Study: New state voting laws impact 5 million

New state voting laws will make it harder for 5 million people to vote in 2012 than during the last presidential election year, according to a study released Monday by the liberal Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

Since last November, 14 states have passed 19 laws and 2 executive orders requiring voters to show photo identification at polls, cutting back early voting periods or imposing new restrictions on voter registration drives, the New York Times reports.

Brennan Center researchers said the biggest impact will come from laws requiring people to show government-issued photo identification to vote, the New York Times reports. This year, five states — Wisconsin, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — passed laws to join Indiana and Georgia in requiring photo I.D. at voting stations.

According to the New York Times:

Republicans, who have passed almost all of the new election laws, say they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, and question why photo identification should be routinely required at airports but not at polling sites. Democrats counter that the new laws are a solution in search of a problem, since voter fraud is rare. They worry that the laws will discourage, or even block, eligible voters — especially poor voters, young voters and African-American voters, who tend to vote for Democrats.

Lawrence Norden, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, told Mother Jones magazine that the estimate of 5 million people affected by the voting laws is conservative. "The whole issue of access to the polls has become politicized in a way we haven't seen in the past," he said. "If you're poor…and you don't have a birth certificate or a credit card, then it becomes extremely difficult to get those things so you can get out and vote. Some of those people are going to get ID [and be able to vote], but some of them aren't."

“Five million voters is considerably more than the margin in two out of the last three presidential elections,” Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center, told the Washington Post. “These kinds of rules matter enormously. If this is a close election, as it may well be, these voting rules can turn out to be quite significant.”