Voter ID Laws & Political Protectionism
On the popular conservative crusade against giants that turn out to be windmills.
Voter ID is perennially popular because the argument for it makes a lot of sense, at least on paper. After all, a photo ID is available at your DMV. It’s pretty inexpensive. It feels logical to require proof that someone can vote.
But is there a real and pressing need for Voter ID? Advocates of the law say that it’s needed to help prevent fraud, but there’s almost no evidence to back them up. Yes, voter fraud exists but it is astonishingly rare. Moreover, the type of fraud preventable through strict Voter ID laws is all but non-existent.
As I will demonstrate below, voter ID laws might be popular, but they’re not necessary. More importantly, they limit the constitutional right to vote for citizens without cause.
What is Voter ID?
According to the New York Times, 32 states have some form of a voter ID law, and that number is increasing. States without a requirement, such as my home state of Pennsylvania, allow voters to cast their ballot by signing on the voter rolls to confirm their identity. Each law is slightly different, but they fall into one of three broad categories:
- Identification Requested: Poll workers ask to see ID. Some states allow persons who previously voted at that location to cast a ballot without showing ID. Others may allow you to cast a provisional ballot and then return with your ID later that day to ensure the vote counts.
- Identification Required: Voters have to have an acceptable form of identification with them, such as their registration card, to vote. States determine what identification they accept. Some states allow citizens without valid identification to cast a provisional ballot and then return with their ID later.
- Photo Identification Required: Voters need a photo ID, such as a driver’s license, to vote.
For information about the laws in your state, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) has an excellent overview. When politicians and special interest groups advocate voter ID, they’re usually referring to Photo ID.
The Reality Of Voter Fraud
The claimed intent of requiring identification to vote is to prevent voter fraud. Voter fraud does exist, but it is extremely rare. In 2007, the Brennan Center For Justice investigated every claim of fraud. Their report estimates that the rate of fraud is between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. This means for every 1 million votes, there are, at worst, an estimated 25 instances of fraud.
In 2014, the Washington Post published an exhaustive investigation into voter fraud. From 2000 through 2014, Americans cast approximately one billion ballots. Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, investigated every claim of voter impersonation. In one billion ballots, he discovered 31 credible claims of impersonation.
Thirty one claims in a billion ballots is a .0000031% instance of fraud. And remember — this is the number of credible, not proven claims. Many fraud cases won’t result in a conviction, even when there is unambiguous evidence of intentional impersonation. In one recent case, a women cast a vote as her deceased mother to fulfill her “dying wish” to vote for Donald Trump. The prosecutor did not press charges because he claimed the woman was not otherwise a criminal.
This is not the only study out there either. The Brennan Center For Justice maintains a list of reports on this persistent myth, including investigations by official government bodies and Republican dominated inquiries, all of which turned up next to no evidence of widespread fraud.
The Heritage Foundation Database
When conservatives try to bolster their argument that voter ID is indeed a problem that requires ID, they point to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group that supports strict Voter ID laws, and maintains a database of voter fraud convictions which is not comprehensive, but which nevertheless remains a favorite of pundits advocating stricter laws. When you visit the main page, you’re presented with their fraud “statistics.”
After more than two years of research, The Heritage Foundation discovered 1,107 proven instances of voter fraud. These numbers feel big, but the way they’re presented is misleading.
For example, they don’t let you know the time frame the database covers. While The Heritage Foundation does list the year, you can’t search by them. This is important because it makes it impossible to judge the frequency for fraud.
The Washington Post’s investigation gave you the years it covered. It also listed how many votes were cast, allowing you to get a feeling for how significant the fraud was. That report covered 14 years and a billion votes.
So far, the oldest entry I found is from 1982 — 36 years ago. How many votes happened during that time? Yes, 1,107 is a big number, particularly when the ideal is zero, but context is important. That 1,107 looks a lot smaller when you break it into a percentage and consider just how many Americans vote even in state-level elections, let alone national ones.
Unfortunately, the sleight of hand doesn’t end there.
Misleading Voter Impersonation Convictions
The Heritage Foundation database allows you to search by state or by one of 18 types of fraud. If you read pundits who use this database to advocate for Voter ID, you’d assume that impersonation is a huge problem. There’s only one problem: The Heritage Foundation’s own database doesn’t back this up.
Of the 1,107 proven cases they have, the Heritage Foundation only lists 13 impersonation cases. This means that according to their own database, only 1% of fraud cases come from people lying at the polls.
Indeed, their definition for impersonation is broad and covers instances Voter ID would not prevent. For example, the database lists Robin Trainor as a case of impersonation. She was also Judge of Election for the location where she committed fraud. Needless to say, her actions would not be prevented with the strictest Voter ID laws.
Of the 13 listed cases of conviction for voter impersonation, Voter ID would not prevent at least four of them (5)(7)(11); one was a man who committed a felony in support of Voter ID (3), and in another case the criminal presented ID, but it was falsified (12). The database also lists the same fraud (Jeanne Johnson helped Latunia Thomas) as two separate cases. The remaining instances were all individuals casting votes on their own, not as part of a vast conspiracy.
To their credit, the Heritage Foundation provides most of this information in their summaries. They also cite their sources. But when they talk about the frequency of fraud, details like this are often left out. These are all examples of technical impersonation, but context matters, as does proportion.
There Is No Evidence Of Widespread Fraud
One important thing to note is that every case of impersonation in the database is an individual committing fraud. After winning the 2016 election, Donald Trump implied that “millions” voted illegally. To find evidence of this, he created the Voter Integrity Commission. After bipartisan pushback, Trump disbanded the commission. Unfortunately, he continues to push the myth of a voting conspiracy. The Washington Post analyzed more than 86 million ballots in 2016 and found four confirmed cases of fraud. Two of them were Trump voters attempting to vote twice.
An investigation by the George W. Bush administration convicted only 86 people of fraud after five years. According to the New York Times, it appears that most illegal votes were cast due to confusion, not ill will.
Every major investigation into voter fraud ends the same: There is evidence it exists, and that it is rare. The evidence for widespread fraud isn’t there, especially to the tune of millions of ballots.
The Gutting Of The Voting Rights Act
In 1965, the government passed the Voting Rights Act, which outlawed racial discrimination at the polls. Before this law, states used tools like literacy tests to keep black citizens from voting.
One way the government helped enforce the law was through a “pre-clearance” requirement. If a state had a history of voting-rights abuse, any change they made to their law was subject to federal review. The government reviewed the bill and only approved changes that were not racially-motivated.
This law guided elections until the Supreme Court ruled the pre-clearance requirement unconstitutional. Without this provision, the federal government had little authority to revoke racially-motivated changed. This ruling essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act, and states took notice.
Since 2010, more than 22 states passed laws restricting access to the polls. This includes: reducing or eliminating early voting, restricting registration, and strict Voter ID. The number of states passing laws requiring identification to vote accelerated after Shelby County v. Holder in 2013.
A strict Voter ID law generally means that a citizen must have a valid form of identification to vote. If they don’t have one, they can’t go into the booth. A non-strict law can mean either:
- Voter without a valid ID can fill out a provisional ballot. If the election is close, an election official will verify and count their ballots.
- Voter only needs identification the first time they vote at a given polling place. For example, if you move into an area, you might have to show ID at the primary, but you won’t at the general election.
- A poll worker can vouch for an individual without valid ID, allowing them to vote.
For more information, the NCSL voter ID page is a wonderful resource.
Voter ID As A Pretense
States who enacted Voter ID and other measures claimed they were doing so to prevent fraud. They’ll point to the Heritage database, or rely on apocryphal tales of graveyard voting to support their cause.
Advocates for Voter ID laws argue they can’t be racist since they require everyone to have a valid ID. After all, you need an ID for almost everything else, why not have one for voting? Others will attempt to shame critics of Voter ID by engaging in the bigotry of low expectations.
The problem with these arguments is that they break down when you look at how states enact their Voter ID laws. Requiring an ID to vote isn’t racist on its own, but how it’s implemented most certainly is.
North Carolina Targeted Minorities With “Surgical Precision”
In 2013, North Carolina passed a series of voting laws that were among the strictest put in place at the time. The law eliminated same-day voter registration, cut back early voting, and prevented pre-registration, meaning that before this law, citizens who were 16–17 but would be 18 by election day could register to vote. On top of this, the state would review voters to present a valid form of ID on election day.
In 2016, a federal appeals court ruled that these strict requirements were unconstitutional. Their ruling also noted how surgically the state lawmakers attempted to disenfranchise minority voters.
The New York Times wrote:
“The appeals court noted that the North Carolina Legislature “requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices” — then, data in hand, “enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans.”
The changes to the voting process “target African Americans with almost surgical precision,” the circuit court wrote, and “impose cures for problems that did not exist.”
The court did not call out the legislature as racist. Instead, they said that the laws likely had a political motivation. Because blacks largely vote for Democrats, they became the easiest voting bloc to target. The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the case, allowing the appeals court ruling to stand.
Texan Voter ID Ruled Discriminatory
In 2011, Texas passed their own strict ID law. To vote in the Lone Star state, you had to present one of seven acceptable forms of ID. The bill was unusual because it accepted handgun licenses as valid ID. Conversely, a student ID was not considered a valid form of ID, disadvantaging younger voters.
In 2012, the Department of Justice rejected the law because Texas’ own data showed that 600,000 voters lacked “valid ID.” Supporters of the bill justified burdening more than half a million people out of fear of fraud. Gov. Greg Abbot, previously the state’s attorney general, stated that his office prosecuted 50 cases of fraud in the past decade.
Since its signing, the law’s faced a tough legal battle. The state court ruled, multiple times that the law was discriminatory. When Texas appealed this ruling, the 5th District Court, the most conservative in the country, ruled the law as unconstitutional. However, they said that the lower court went too far implying discrimination. The Supreme Court declined to hear this case, for now.
Pennsylvania Law Ruled An Unreasonable Burden
My home state tried to pass their own Voter ID law. Signed into law in 2012, the bill never had a chance to go into effect due to legal challenges.
The law would require voters present valid photo ID at their polling place. A state judge blocked this law, as it would create an undue burden on the expression of the constitutional right to vote. In addition, the judge said that the state couldn’t provide evidence of widespread fraud. Critics of the bill argued that the potential benefit did not outweigh the costs. Currently, you do no need to present an ID to vote in my state.
The Reason Voter ID Laws Exist
The common thread you’ll find in every Voter ID law is one of partisanship. State legislators pass these laws in an attempt to sculpt the electorate. Minorities, young voters and elderly voters in nursing homes are much less likely to have valid ID. If you require an extra step they have to take before casting their ballot, they might stay home. After all, even simple things like the weather can influence turnout.
Advocates of Voter ID laws are not always subtle about how the hope the law will change who goes to the polls. According to a local paper, Sue Burmeister said that “if blacks in her district were not paid, they would not vote.” (Brennan Center For Justice has a writeup of how this statement happened here).
Most pundits for Voter ID approach the results from a partisan, not racial, perspective. Court findings in both North Carolina and Texas confirm this.
Thankfully, evidence suggests that these strict laws do not have the impact advocates hope they will. Despite strict voter ID laws, voter turn out is up in states with them, such as Georgia.
Proponents of Voter ID see these turnout figures and might reply, “See? Voter ID doesn’t discriminate, so why not be safe just to be sure?”
It sounds like a compelling argument, but it’s not. The fraud they’re trying to keep our elections safe from is so rare it essentially doesn’t exist. Take the Brennan Center For Justice’s worst case fraud rate of 0.0025 percent and look at the 2016 election. 136,669,237 people voted in 2016. Even with the worst case scenario, at most 3,417 were fraudulent.
That wouldn’t be enough to flip a state, much less the entire election. But fraud likely wasn’t even that high, as the WaPo investigation only found a handful of cases.
Voter ID is Unfounded Protectionism
If you believe that government should only become involved when the benefits outweigh the costs, Voter ID makes no sense. According to Texas’ own numbers, they limited the rights of 600,000 people because of 50 cases of fraud in the past decade. That is 12,000 American citizens having their rights limited for every one instance of “fraud.”
But it’s not just Voter ID. States enacting these laws often tie them to other measures. From North Carolina’s early voting to New Jersey GOP overturning the New Jersey Consent Decree, you cannot observe voter ID in a vacuum. It’s not a coincidence that many states with strict ID laws, most notably North Carolina, face accusations of partisan gerrymandering as well. Context matters.
Any requirement we put on voting is a limit to the constitutional rights of an American to vote.
Some, such as the ban on vote buying, are necessary to protect the laws. But what of Voter ID? It is a solution without a problem, a limit without a reason.
Voter ID is needlessly burdensome government regulation, a waste of conservative intellectual and political energy better spent elsewhere, a waste of taxpayer money, and an insidious means of demonizing fellow citizens who hold different political views as potential or actual criminals.
No matter how popular an idea is, when you’re talking about restricting rights you need more than opinions, you need data. When it comes to Voter ID, the data, across billions of ballots and dozens of years, is clear. The potential limits it places on liberty far outweigh the insignificant benefits it may offer. The Voter ID crusade should come to an end.
