Voter ID laws have been controversial for almost 20 years now, but increasingly so over the past couple years. Proponents of such laws argue that they're necessary for securing our elections so as to protect against voter impersonation and that citizens are already expected to have forms of ID when interacting with other aspects of society, and thus such expectations applied to voting are not an undue burden. Opponents (which wholesale opposition is largely overestimated; there is support among many Democrats for Voter ID) argue that voter ID laws are partisan laws that are often packed with other non-ID-related voting restrictions, such as shortening early voter windows, removing pre-registration for high school students, eliminating out-of-precinct voting, eliminating same-day registration, etc. Additionally, opponents argue that the process for deciding which forms of ID are allowed to be used are often intended to disenfranchise specific groups of voters--with North Carolina's 2013 voter ID being a prime, historical example. It was struck down in the 4th Circuit after it was revealed that legislators drafted the bill after collecting the state's voting data by race, to the point where the court describe the bill as attempting to "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision".
Voter ID is specifically meant to address voter impersonation, a form of in-person voter fraud. However, voter impersonation is incredibly rare, and greater levels of fraud have been found in absentee mail voting and ballot stuffing.
The aforementioned 2013 North Carolina case also included commentary from the 4th Circuit that legislators “failed to identify even a single individual who has ever been charged with committing in-person voter fraud in North Carolina.”
In Texas, their 2011 Voter ID (also truck by, this time, the 5th Circuit) the court noted that the State was only able to show “two convictions for in-person voter impersonation fraud out of 20 million votes cast in the decade”.
In looking at voter fraud data from public state records, findings have been similar to the following from News21:
Quote (News21 (2012))
A News21 analysis of 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases since 2000 shows that while fraud has occurred, the rate is infinitesimal, and in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent. In an exhaustive public records search, News21 reporters sent thousands of requests to elections officers in all 50 states, asking for every case of fraudulent activity including registration fraud, absentee ballot fraud, vote buying, false election counts, campaign fraud, casting an ineligible vote, voting twice, voter impersonation fraud and intimidation.
Analysis of the resulting comprehensive News21 election fraud database turned up 10 cases of voter impersonation. With 146 million registered voters in the United States during that time, those 10 cases represent one out of about every 15 million prospective voters.
https://votingrights.news21.com/article/election-fraud/What're your thoughts on voter ID, PaRD?