Hey thanks. Tight ship NYU is running on their web presence.
So this is a complete garbage study. Such trash that I can refute the entire thing point by point. Before I do let me point out that this school has put a banner at the top of its site with the text:
Democracy won at the ballot box, but our fight is far from over.
If that is their stance then this school is obviously led by political activists with a clear bias. Okay, moving on:
First off, that's .1563% of American adults. It doesn't try to claim those adults don't have ID, just that it may be inconvenient for them. It's a lot more inconvenient to be poor and not have an ID to get welfare with, so this falls totally flat on its face. Rural areas do not have "dwindling public transportion options," in fact there are more options than ever. I am at a Cabin in the woods 25 minutes from the nearest town with a grocery store. I can order an uber here.
This isn't a second point it's just a rehashing of the first one.
This is really a third rehashing of the first point but with a racial tone. People of color at the same income level have the same options available to them as anyone else. This is really just a takedown of minorities. It's irrelevant.
And the final summary bullet point:
Sauk City, Wisconsin is a completely white town. It has a population of 3k and has NINETY-FOUR minorities in it. A tiny town has limited government resources. Shocker. They then try to link this 97% white town to other unrelated towns with minorities which is a logical fallacy. This is not the type of argument a scientific study should ever make. There is no scientific rigor here.
This is a shit study. It's not shit because the data collection is flawed, it's shit because it uses weak arguments to back up a pre-defined conclusion. It fails to make its case on the merits of the numbers. But that's fine that isn't why it exists.
It exists so that propaganda heads on TV and lefty numbnuts on internet forums can say "NYU proves voter ID disenfranchises voters" which is a huge leap from the actual conclusions of the study which is "a tiny percentage of Americans find it inconvenient to get to the DMV"
This facts in this study do not back up the notion that we should remove authentication from our elections. Politics is the biggest zero-sum game in the entire human race and there is an absolutely immense incentive to cheat.
EDIT: I also want to point out that it's really weird they went and dug up a bunch of stats online and strung them together to try and build this narrative. Wouldn't it have been easier to just contact the DMV offices in these places and get actual facts on registration numbers? I find it hard to believe a DMV would be unwilling to provide a simple top-line number as a courtesy to a scientific study. They didn't do that, and they didn't even interview anyone. A sample size of zero. Brilliant.