Who Is Impacted by Voter ID Laws?
Laws that require photo ID at the polls vary, but the strictest laws limit the forms of acceptable documentation to only a handful of cards. For example, in Texas, voters must show
one of seven forms of state or federal-issue photo ID, with a valid expiration date: a driver’s license, a personal ID card issued by the state, a concealed handgun license, a military ID, citizenship certificate or a passport. The name on the ID must exactly match the one on the voter rolls.
African-Americans and Latinos are more likely to lack one of these qualifying IDs,
according to
several estimates. Even when the state offers a free photo ID, these voters, who are disproportionately low-income, may not be able to procure the underlying documents, such as a birth certificate, to obtain one.
In Texas, for example, challengers to the law cited an African-American grandmother who could not afford the $25 to purchase her birth certificate to get an ID, and an elderly African-American veteran and longtime voter who was turned away at the polls in 2013 despite having three types of ID, because none qualified under the new law.
And
new research from the Government Accountability Office, an independent agency that prepares reports for members of Congress, suggests that voter ID laws are having an impact at the polls. Turnout dropped among both young people and African-Americans in Kansas and Tennessee after new voter ID requirements took effect in 2012, the study found.
Six of the 16 states that have passed voter ID laws since 2010 have a documented history of discriminating against minority voters. All but one of those states’ laws were put in place after the Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that required them to seek approval from the Justice Department for any voting-law changes.
Courts have so far blocked three ID laws. A state judge struck down Pennsylvania’s law earlier this year, determining that it discriminated against low-income and minority voters. Two weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court
blocked Wisconsin’s from taking effect for this election, and last week, a state court declared Arkansas’ voter ID law unconstitutional. Lawsuits are currently pending against similar laws in North Carolina and Alabama, though they won’t be decided before the November elections.
Voter ID laws have all been sponsored by Republicans and passed overwhelmingly by Republican legislatures. A conservative U.S. circuit judge, Richard Posner, in a recent scathing critique of these laws, calling the expressed concern about fraud a “a mere fig leaf” and that they instead “appear to be aimed at limiting voting by minorities, particularly blacks.”
“There is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud,” Posner
wrote, “…and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens.”
Obenshain, the Virginia senator, said his law wasn’t about keeping voters from the polls. “There’s only one class of people who are going to be discouraged from voting, and that’s fraudulent voters.”