In Sunday’s Washington Post, George Mason Professor Michael McDonald (no, not that Michael McDonald - smooth as it would be …) debunks 5 myths about turning out the vote commonly believed by election-watchers.

Particularly of note with regard to the current debate over voter ID provisions is McDonald’s identification and debunking of Myth #1: Voter apathy resulting in low election-day turnout has worsened over the last fifty years. Not so, says McDonald.

This is the mother of all turnout myths. There may be plenty of apathetic voters out there, but the idea that ever fewer Americans are showing up at the polls should be put to rest. What’s really happening is that the number of people not eligible to vote is rising — making it seem as though turnout is dropping.Those who bemoan a decline in American civic society point to the drop in turnout from 55.2 percent in 1972, when 18-year-olds were granted the right to vote, to the low point of 48.9 percent in 1996. But that’s looking at the total voting-age population, which includes lots of people who aren’t eligible to vote — namely, noncitizens and convicted felons. These ineligible populations have increased dramatically over the past three decades, from about 2 percent of the voting-age population in 1972 to 10 percent today.

When you take them out of the equation, the post-1972 “decline” vanishes. Turnout rates among those eligible to vote have averaged 55.3 percent in presidential elections and 39.4 percent in midterm elections for the past three decades. There has been variation, of course, with turnout as low as 51.7 percent in 1996 and rebounding to 60.3 percent by 2004. Turnout in the most recent election, in fact, is on a par with the low-60 percent turnout rates of the 1950s and ’60s.

So, how does this bit of empirical research with regard to voter apathy and turnout apply? Well, several of the recent court decisions over voter ID laws have couched themselves in terms of a balancing act between broad voter apathy due to the perception of fraud on the one hand, and the fundamental right of eligible individuals to vote on the other. Take for instance the Missouri Supreme Court’s recent decision striking down the state’s voter ID law:

While the State does have an interest in combating those perceptions, where the fundamental rights of Missouri citizens are at stake, more than mere perception is required for their abridgement. Perceptions are malleable. While it is agreed here that the State’s concern about the perception of fraud is real, if this Court were to approve the placement of severe restrictions on Missourians’ fundamental rights owing to the mere perception of a problem in this instance, then the tactic of shaping public misperception could be used in the future as a mechanism for further burdening the right to vote or other fundamental rights.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision reversing an injuction against Arizona’s voter ID law also describes such a balancing act:

Confidence in the integrity of our electoral processes is essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy. Voter fraud drives honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our government. Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised. … Countering the State’s compelling interest in preventing voter fraud is the plaintiffs’ strong interest in exercising the ‘fundamental political right’ to vote. … Although the likely effects of Proposition 200 are much debated, the possibility that qualified voters might be turned away from the polls would caution any district judge to give careful consideration to the plaintiffs’ challenges.

But is it proper to couch the terms of the voter ID debate as a balancing act between the interest of preventing broad apathy vs. the fundamental right of the individual to vote? As the article in Slate by Rick Hasen linked to by Ben points out, empirical evidence of voter impersonation at the polls is negligible to nil. Meanwhile, as McDonald points out, levels of voter apathy have remained more or less constant when adjusted for changes in voter eligibility. Theoretically, there may be large groups of people who don’t bother to vote due to the perception of fraud via voter impersonation. However, the empirical evidence establishes neither the perception of such a particular fraud, nor such a particular fraud itself.

The narrative resulting from the terms the courts have adopted in the voter ID debate may be the biggest myth of them all.