I disagree. It was designed to target the responses of almost two thousand state legislators who met a specified set of criteria (live in a state that doesn't have a Voter ID law and has a large Hispanic constituency) and compare a "control group" (those who do not support Voter ID laws) with another "control group" (those who do support Voter ID laws), who were given the same email content save for the language for which the messages were written. And then all they had to do was sit back and wait to tabulate the responses. The key being the bolded part -
The results showed that lawmakers who had supported voter ID requirements were much more likely to respond to "Jacob Smith" than to "Santiago Rodriguez," thereby revealing a preference for responding to constituents with Anglophone names over constituents with Hispanic ones. They also showed legislators were more likely to respond to English than Spanish-language constituents.
Among voter ID supporters, the responsiveness to Latino constituents was dramatically lower than to Anglo constituents.
Even within the Spanish language constituents' requests, the Spanish speaker with an Anglo name was responded to nine percentage points more than a Spanish speaker with a Latino name. The latter received virtually no response from the voter ID supporters, with a response rate of just one percent.
Among both Republican and Democrat lawmakers who do not support voter ID, Spanish-language constituents with both Anglo and Spanish surnames received almost the same rate of response at around 12 percent, with no statistical difference in preference for the Anglophone or Hispanic name, Mendez said.
Read more at:
http://phys.org/news/2014-07-state-legislators-favor-voter-id.html#jCpSorry if you can't see the bias.
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