Dossier mode

Across two decades, a consistent, documented pattern of measures has narrowed access to the vote — strict ID laws, the removal of federal review, roll purges, and omnibus rewrites of how ballots are cast — nearly all justified by a fraud problem the record shows barely exists.

Every item is an event, not an inference: a statute signed or a court decision. We grade the measures; we reserve the claim of intent for the one place a court expressly found it, and we attribute the contested turnout effects rather than resolving them.

The Brennan Center's December 2021 roundup: at least 34 restrictive laws across 19 states, out of 440+ restrictive bills introduced in 49 states — the most in any year since it began tracking in 2011. The post-2020 crest of a long campaign.

The modern strict photo-ID era was greenlit on a record showing zero in-person impersonation cases in the state's history.

Indiana passed the first strict photo-ID voting law in 2005; the Supreme Court upheld it in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (Apr. 28, 2008). The plurality accepted the anti-fraud rationale while acknowledging the record held not a single documented case of the impersonation the law targeted. Crawford became the template for a wave of ID laws sanctioned to stop a crime the Court itself noted had never been shown to occur there.

The hinge: in 2013 Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act's preclearance — and previously-blocked laws took effect within hours.

On June 25, 2013 the Court struck the VRA's Section 4(b) coverage formula, disabling the Section 5 preclearance that had required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to clear voting changes with the Justice Department first. Within hours, Texas announced its previously-blocked strict voter-ID law would take immediate effect; a wave of restriction across formerly-covered states followed. The single most consequential event in the modern rollback.

A federal appeals court struck North Carolina's post-Shelby law after finding it targeted Black voters 'with almost surgical precision.'

Weeks after Shelby, North Carolina enacted HB 589 (2013): photo-ID plus cuts to early voting, same-day registration, out-of-precinct provisional ballots, and pre-registration. In 2016 the Fourth Circuit struck it down (NC NAACP v. McCrory), finding discriminatory intent and provisions that targeted African Americans 'with almost surgical precision'; the Supreme Court declined review in 2017. This is the rare item where suppressive intent is not our inference but an express judicial finding.

Kris Kobach's Interstate Crosscheck flagged 7.2 million 'potential duplicate' voters on a crude match — with a documented 75% false-positive rate — before shutting down in 2019.

The multistate Crosscheck program, expanded under Kansas SoS Kris Kobach, matched voters on little more than name and date of birth. Its 2017 run compared ~98 million records across 28 states and returned ~7.2 million 'potential duplicate' flags; Virginia's own list-maintenance report documented a 75% false-positive rate. Suspended indefinitely in December 2019 under an ACLU settlement. (A cited academic study estimated ~200 legitimate voters flagged per double vote it might prevent — attributed to its researchers.)

The Supreme Court blessed aggressive voter-roll purges: Husted (2018) upheld Ohio's 'use it or lose it' removal of registrants who skip elections.

On June 11, 2018 the Court held 5–4 in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute that federal law permits Ohio's removal of registrants who miss elections and fail to return a mailed notice — a green light for aggressive purges. In the same era Georgia, under a Secretary of State who was simultaneously the Republican candidate for governor, ran large purges and 'exact-match' holds; those figures are attributed to the reporting that documented them.

Florida voters restored rights to ~1.4 million people with felony records in 2018 — then the legislature conditioned it on paying all court fines and fees.

In November 2018, 64.55% of Floridians passed Amendment 4, restoring voting rights to most who had completed felony sentences. In 2019 the legislature passed SB 7066, conditioning restoration on payment of all outstanding fines, fees, and restitution — which critics and a dissenting federal judge likened to a poll tax, since many cannot afford the debts and the state often cannot say what is owed. The Eleventh Circuit upheld it in 2020. Facts are FACT; 'poll tax' is the critics'/dissent's characterization, not a holding.

After 2020, omnibus laws in Georgia (SB 202) and Texas (SB 1) rewrote how and when a ballot can be cast.

Georgia's SB 202 (signed Mar. 25, 2021) replaced absentee signature-matching with ID rules, limited drop boxes, criminalized giving water to voters in line, and empowered the state to take over county boards. Texas SB 1 (signed Sept. 7, 2021) added mail-ballot ID/matching rules, banned 24-hour and drive-thru voting, and expanded partisan poll watchers — its matching rule rejected thousands of ballots on first use. Passage and provisions are FACT; the turnout effect is contested and litigated, and attributed.

The tools rotate; the direction doesn't.

Help us fill these lines.

• OpenA rigorous, consensus turnout figure for the net effect of the post-2020 omnibus laws — genuinely contested, litigated, and studied to conflicting results.
• OpenA documented modern U.S. election whose outcome was changed by the in-person impersonation these ID laws are sold to prevent — the missing justification for the whole timeline.