That may be the case when it comes to voter ID laws. MIT economist Enrico Cantoni has published a paper entitled, “Got ID? The Zero Effects of Voter ID Laws on County-Level Turnout, Vote Shares, and Uncounted Ballots, 1992-2014.” Here’s what he says in the abstract:

Do voter ID laws disenfranchise voters? Despite a ferocious, politically charged debate in the media and public opinion, the scholarly evidence on the effects of voter ID requirements is inconclusive. In this paper, I use county-level administrative data from 1992 to 2014 and a Differences-in-Differences research design to identify and estimate the impact of voter ID laws on turnout, Democratic vote share, and irregular ballots. I find no effect of ID laws on any of these outcomes. All estimates are fairly precise and robust to a number of regression specifications. Estimates of heterogeneous effects by educational attainment, poverty rate and minority presence are similarly supportive of ID laws having no impact on electoral outcomes of any type.

H/T Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution.