It’s not the same thing as fake news, but it’s nearly as bad.
A recent study suggesting voter ID laws suppress minority turnout appears to contain many significant errors, according to a review published by professors at Stanford, Yale and University of Pennsylvania.
So many, in fact, that it seems increasingly likely the entire study is bunk.
The Washington Examiner’s David Freddoso explained here what went wrong.
Basically, the study’s authors “used the wrong data, they misinterpreted that data, they failed to take into account other pre-existing factors that explain differences between states with and without voter ID, and when tested, their model demonstrably assumes what it is trying to prove,” he wrote.
In other words, the voter ID study, which was authored by the University of California’s Nazita Lajevardi and Zoltan Hajnal and Bucknell University’s Lindsay Nielson, is a mess.
Unfortunately, questions about the report’s accuracy didn’t come up until after several newsrooms had already repeated its supposed findings.
The Washington Post, for example, published an article on Feb. 4, titled “New evidence that voter ID laws ‘skew democracy’ in favor of white Republicans,” in which the questioned study is presented as being closer to fact than fiction.
“The researchers … found that these laws consistently and significantly decreased turnout not just among traditionally Democratic-leaning groups, like blacks and Hispanics, but among Republican voters too,” the article reported.
Later, on Feb. 15, the Post published an op-ed by the now-questioned study’s authors, Hajnal, Lajevardi and Nielson, titled, “Do voter identification laws suppress minority voting? Yes. We did the research.”
The Los Angeles Times also published an op-ed authored by Hajnal titled, “The results on voter ID laws are in — and it’s bad news for ethnic and racial minorities.”
In an article titled, “How Voter ID Laws Discriminate,” the Atlantic claimed, “A new comprehensive study finds evidence that strict voting laws do suppress the ballot along racial lines.”
The Atlantic’s CityLab similarly reported, “More Research Shows Voter ID Laws Hurt Minorities.”
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported, “UCSD researchers: Voter ID laws suppress Dems, minorities.”
Mediaite ran an op-ed, “Study Shows That Republican-Backed Voter ID Laws Are Really Working for Them.”
The study also played well with far-left media groups, including Talking Points Memo and ThinkProgress.
None of the write-ups mentioned in the above currently carry any sort of update of editor’s note drawing attention to the fact a team of researchers have cast serious doubt on the study.
Vox.com, to its great credit, did a lot of work this week exploring whether the study should be dismissed as a factual argument against voter ID laws.
The dubious study is not the same thing as “fake news,” in that it wasn’t created from thin air by a team of teens in Macedonia. Media repeating the study’s dubious findings is also not the same thing as “fake news,” because credulous reporters are not the same thing as straight-up con-men.
Nevertheless, should the questionable study prove finally to be certifiably bogus, and it comes only after multiple newsrooms put the story in readers’ hands, it will be as harmful as actual “fake news.”
There’s a difference between the intentionally false and the sloppy, but the ends result is about the same.
