What's Wrong with Voter ID Laws?

It sounds like common sense, doesn't it? If you are going to vote, you should show your state issued ID to prove your identity, right? Democrats must want their gangs of ACORN-based cronies to steal the elections from hard working American conservatives! ...well, it turns out the case is actually much more complex than that. Luckily, for anyone interested in a thorough case against these voter restrictions, Mother Jones has you covered!

"Overall, 91 percent of registered Republicans had some form of photo ID, compared to only 83 percent of registered Democrats.

In a country of 300 million you'll find a bit of almost anything. But multiple studies taking different approaches have all come to the same conclusion: The rate of voter fraud in American elections is close to zero.

The best-publicized fraud cases involve either absentee ballots or voter registration fraud (for example, paid signature gatherers filling in "Mary Poppins" on the forms, a form of cheating that's routinely caught by registrars already). But photo ID laws can't stop that: They only affect people actually trying to impersonate someone else at the polling place. And there's virtually no record, either now or in the past, of this happening on a large scale.

What's more, a moment's thought suggests that this is vanishingly unlikely to be a severe problem, since there are few individuals willing to risk a felony charge merely to cast one extra vote and few organizations willing or able to organize large-scale in-person fraud and keep it a secret.

...it's fair to wonder how much impact these laws have in real life. The answer: It's not entirely clear. The Brennan Center generated a lot of headlines for a recent report suggesting that upwards of 5 million voters could be affected just by laws passed in 2011. But a 2009 study published in Politics on the actual impact of voting law changes concluded that "voter-ID laws appear to have little to no main effects on turnout."  

Still, in a close race, a modest effect can make a difference, and the cliff-hangers of 2000 and 2004 demonstrate that even presidential contests can hinge on tiny changes in turnout.

Getting an ID card from the state usually requires you to produce a birth certificate, and Barbara Zia of the South Carolina League of Women Voters recently explained what this means in her state: "Many South Carolinians, especially citizens of color, were born at home and lack birth certificates, and so to obtain those birth certificates is a very costly endeavor and also an administrative nightmare." (emphasis mine)

Even felons who have paid their debt to society are being targeted.

For more, see the statistics Mother Jones has compiled on voter fraud.