spring semester current event week 3

Government & Economics

PRO/CON: Do we need voter ID laws?

PRO: Russia Thanks You For Opposing Voter ID

The overwhelming majority of Americans support voter ID requirements because they instill confidence in our elections. Showing an ID when you help pick the next president is just plain common sense.

But at a time when concerns about foreign interference in our elections are high, ID requirements also help protect the integrity of our electoral process. We can't stop Russia's attempts at interference from abroad, but we can protect the security of our ballots here at home.

Voter ID laws serve three core functions: they are checks against errors, they prevent wrongdoing and they give citizens confidence in the voting process in general. Thanks to the more than 30 states with some voter ID requirements, Americans trust electoral outcomes — even ones they do not like.

Anti-ID activists and a hostile media suggest that ID laws are an attack on our democracy, and they accuse its supporters of bigotry — or worse. The Obama Justice Department took this to the extreme in 2014 when its taxpayer-paid experts actually testified that black North Carolinians were not "sophisticated" enough to understand voter ID requirements.

In fact, election integrity safeguards like voter ID are extremely popular with the American people. Polling from Politico, Marist, Gallup, Rasmussen, the Washington Post and others regularly find that between 70 and 85 percent of Americans support voter ID requirements. In this political climate, such numbers are rarely seen.

A new NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll further underscores the demand for these laws. Americans said they are significantly more worried about voter fraud — ineligible voters participating in elections — than they are so-called voter suppression, or even foreign interference.

"Voter suppression" is a term designed to confuse by conflating perfectly legal activity, such as keeping voter rolls current, with illegal activity like discouraging citizens from voting. It's similar to voter ID foes comparing identification requirements to the outrages of the Jim Crow-era racial discrimination.

Opponents of voter IDs have long predicted that these policies would prevent hundreds of thousands of citizens in places like Texas and South Carolina from voting. Instead, we've seen record voter turnout in minority communities across the country.

The data is clear: There is no evidence of disenfranchisement due to voter ID. Reports to the contrary — claims, for example, that Wisconsin's voter ID law took 200,000 votes from Hillary Clinton — have been repeatedly debunked. The National Bureau of Economic Research even published a report in 2019 suggesting the opposite effect.

One common argument is that obtaining a photo ID is a burden that too many voters cannot bear. But as the recent NPR poll confirms, just 6 percent of respondents reported any level of difficulty with "registration or identification" at the polls.

Now that states like Arkansas and North Carolina are passing ballot measures to put voter ID into state constitutions, these policies have attained a new level of popularity.

One challenge supporters of voter ID face is that it's impossible to prove a negative. No research will ever conclusively tabulate how much fraud these laws have prevented. But voter ID does more than just stop direct voter fraud. It also helps combat outside efforts to undermine our elections.

Two-factor authentication is a part of our daily lives. Think of the last time a website sent you a text message to prove you are you. Now that our voter registration systems are being targeted by bad actors like Russia, we need ID requirements more than ever to access securely our own records for voting or even address changes.

Our politics are so polarized that a few sneaky edits or unauthorized online requests could throw an election. If such high-tech manipulation is a rising risk in our near future, then voter ID will help to bar the doors to foreign infiltrators.

If you're still fighting voter ID in 2020, the Russians thank you for your service.

J. Christian Adams is the president and general counsel for the Public Interest Legal Foundation and a former Justice Department lawyer. He also served on the Presidential Advisory Commission for Election Integrity. The opinions in this essay are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Tribune News Service or its editors.

CON: Why Conservatives Can't — And Won't — Quit Voter ID Laws

It's another election year, which means that voter ID laws are back in the news.

Already, Kentucky Republican legislators introduced a new bill requiring voters to present a limited form of ID when they show up to the polls before casting a ballot. If passed, the voter ID law, which is supported by Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams, would be in place for November's general elections.

A similar push is being made by Republican legislators in Nebraska, while implementation of North Carolina's new voter ID law was recently blocked by a federal judge for being discriminatory. North Carolina's new law was meant to replace a previous iteration struck down in 2016 for targeting African Americans "with almost surgical precision."

Today, more than 30 states have adopted some type of voter ID law. Of those, 10 states have strict requirements pertaining to the forms of identification that qualify or extra steps voters without IDs must take to prove their identity.

That voter ID laws keep materializing is practically maddening given all we know about them, namely that such requirements are discriminatory and virtually pointless. Besides disproportionately harming historically underrepresented groups, voter IDs are redundant and have repeatedly proven unnecessary. For instance, voters are already required to attest to their identity and eligibility when they vote. Moreover, death by lightning strike is more common than occurrences of in-person voter impersonation, the only kind of fraud voter IDs purport to prevent.

Studies demonstrating the negative effects of voter ID laws are well-documented, widely reported and have been repeated ad nauseam. Any conservative lawmaker claiming ignorance is either incompetent or lying. Or, perhaps, there's something much bigger and more nefarious at play.

I've written elsewhere that conservative lawmakers who introduce and promote voter ID laws know these laws are harmful and violate the fundamental right to vote. But why would they keep introducing a policy they know is bad to address a problem that is virtually nonexistent?

Despite claims by voter ID proponents, the goal of these laws is not to protect the integrity of our elections, but rather to tip elections in their favor. By making it harder for certain groups to vote, conservative lawmakers who promote voter IDs can insulate themselves from accountability and maintain political control. It is not a coincidence that groups disproportionately affected by voter ID laws passed by conservatives generally favor progressive-leaning candidates.

Voter ID requirements represent just one of many tools in a big bag of tricks conservatives rely upon to circumvent normal democratic processes and manipulate electoral outcomes. Other favorites include closing polling places in communities of color, restricting voting opportunities on college campuses, engaging in discriminatory voter purges, restricting voting rights for justice-involved people and adopting exact-match signature requirements for absentee voting. Although not unique to conservatives, gerrymandering is another preferred ploy, as is opposing common sense campaign finance limits. And when their attempts to keep people from voting fail, Republican legislators resort to blatant power grabs like those witnessed in Michigan and Wisconsin in the aftermath of the 2018 elections.

Conservatives have long relied upon voter suppression and anti-democratic strong-arm tactics to preserve their own power. This is why it was so richly ironic when Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, who has personally pushed for voter ID requirements at the federal level, penned a January 2019 op-ed condemning H.R.1, the For the People Act, as a "naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party."

In fact, the act, which passed with the support of every House Democrat but (tellingly) no Republicans, would actually remove barriers to voting by undoing or neutralizing many troublesome policies — such as voter ID laws — conservatives have advanced as part of their real, decades-long power grab.

In coming weeks and months, voters will cast ballots in consequential primary and general elections that will determine who controls the levers of political power. Not coincidentally, during this same time, proposals for new voter ID requirements will surely increase in frequency. Although such proposals will be couched in fear-mongering over baseless claims of voter fraud and other fabricated excuses dreamt up by conservatives, Americans will not be fooled. Rather than being based upon good, sound policy decisions, the true purpose and utility of voter ID laws is to help conservatives win elections — nothing more, nothing less.

Danielle Root is the associate director of Voting Rights and Access to Justice at the Center for American Progress. The opinions in this essay are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Tribune News Service or its editors.