In a phone interview earlier today, Craig Eiland told me that the Carter-Baker commission testified that Voter I.D. would result in 150,000 voters being disenfranchised statewide. That is an average of 1,000 per legislative district. If this average held true, based on the electoral numbers, Democrats would lose 7 seats in the House. * * * * After I posted this information, I received an off-the-record call from a representative of a prominent public official. The representative was calling for himself, not for the official. He said that he had researched the witnesses on the Voter I.D. bill and that he could not find any witnesses from the Carter-Baker commission. In a response to a comment about this post, I said that I would contact Eiland for further information. Here is his source, sent by his office: “Toby Moore was one of the witnesses at the House Voter ID testimony. He worked with Carter-Baker, and he testified that the low end number of affected voters in Texas would be 150,000.” “Here’s some quick math to demonstrate that Voter ID would cost Democrats net votes in Texas: “Texas has 13.5 million voters. Carter-Baker in 2004 and Carter-Ford in 2001 have said that anyway between 5% and 12% of voters won’t have the necessary ID. Meanwhile, Carter-Baker in 2008 said that African Americans are twice as likely as whites NOT to have the necessary ID. Given that 85% to 90% of African Americans support Democrats, it is easy to extrapolate a clear net-loss of votes to Democrats of somewhere between 150,000 and 500,000 net votes.”