Three Harvard grad students experimented with whether there was ethnic prejudice in local election administration by emailing every local or county election official, commission and supervisor in 48 states with Latino-sounding and non-Latino-sounding names and examined the responses. What they found were that local election officials were three-and-a-half to four-times more likely to respond to the emails that came from the non-Latino name, Greg Walsh, than the Latino name, Luis Rodriguez.

The gap in those responses grew three points wider when their emails contained questions about voter ID.

The students were able to find qualitative bias as well, meaning even when election officials responded to the Latino name, the information included was less accurate or informative than the information given to “Greg Walsh.”

“Our results indicate that changes to existing voting regulations are likely to differentially increase information costs for Latino voters because public officials are less responsive to their inquiries than to non-Latinos,” wrote the study’s authors.

The Washington Post asked True the Vote president Catherine Engelbrecht about the study. She didn’t pass it to her Latino counterpart Voto Honesto — which appears to no longer exist — but rather the Texan of German background took it upon herself to dismiss the findings, calling it “a conclusion in desperate search of a viable methodology.”

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