A study of 14,000 non-voters was released last week, and the reasons eligible voters gave for not voting were not surprising. The results undermined the narrative of “voter suppression” popular among liberals and the mainstream media and demonstrated that election integrity protections do not keep people home on Election Day.

. . . Only 8 percent of nonvoters said they don’t vote because they don’t have the time to get to the polls — fourth on the list of reasons they cited. Only 5 percent of nonvoters said they don’t vote because they aren’t registered. . . .

The study, which involved polling and interviews with over 14,000 people, showed that a plurality of nonvoters cited a dislike of the candidates (17 percent) and a feeling that their votes don’t matter (12 percent) as the main motivators for not voting.

There were similar responses with why eligible citizens chose not to register. According to the study, 29 percent of nonvoters said they were not registered to vote because of a lack of interest, followed by 13 percent saying their votes don’t matter. Only 8 percent said they don’t vote because they don’t know how or it’s too complicated.

Only 3 percent of nonvoters said a more convenient process to register would motivate them to vote in more elections. . . . Structural issues such as voter ID laws and difficulty accessing polling places didn’t come up enough to even be marked in the Knight survey results. In fact, 89 percent of voters, 76 percent of nonvoters and 69 percent of young people aged 18-24 found voting either very or somewhat easy.

This dramatically undercuts the anti-election integrity narrative, which claims that protections for election integrity prevent eligible people from voting. Those advocates are no longer only focused on eliminating protections at polling places, such as voter identification laws, but now seek to eliminate voter registration requirements altogether. This survey demonstrates, however, that there are a variety of reasons that people do not vote, as is there right, but the number of people who stay home because of procedures that protect the integrity of elections is so small as to be statistically insignificant. At the same time, election integrity protections invaluably improve the confidence of voters in election results and our electoral system as a whole.