Evidence suggests that state legislators are working to restrict access to the vote in response to minority turnout

In the past two elections there has been a dramatic increase in the number of restrictive voting laws passed at the state level. Support for these laws tends to break along party lines, with Republicans claiming these laws are needed to defend against voter fraud, and Democrats arguing that it is actually a form of voter suppression. In their recent research, Keith Gunnar Bentele and Erin O’Brien show that these proposals tend to be introduced in battleground states after periods of increased voter turnout among minority and low-income groups and are passed more frequently under Republican-controlled state legislatures.