Stephen Richer, former recorder of Maricopa Country, Arizona, is CEO of the communications firm Republic Affairs and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
In recent years — in recent weeks — discussing voter identification in a rational, factual manner seems to have become almost impossible.
On Nov. 24, Elon Musk wrote on his social media platform X that “Voter ID is crucial to prevent fraud and save democracy in America.” He added, incorrectly, that “California and New York actually banned use of ID to vote! It is illegal to show your ID in those states.”
It is not illegal to show identification; showing ID just isn’t required. For example, California confirms identity through signature comparison.
On Dec. 27, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, after learning of Minnesota’s long-standing “vouching” law, wrote, also on X, “This is absurd. Can someone please explain the best argument for why we don’t require citizens to show state or federal ID to vote?”
The law Ackman cited, however, pertains only to proof of residence, not proof of identity. If an already-registered voter has moved recently, but still lives in the same precinct, “vouching” allows another registered voter at the voting location to attest under penalty of perjury that the questioned voter still lives in the precinct.
On the other side of the debate, any proposal to expand voter identification requirements is met with warnings of democratic catastrophe. In 2021, Georgia legislators passed S.B. 202, which included an early-ballot identification requirement. President Joe Biden called the new law “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”
Yet Georgians voted at record levels in 2022 and reported overwhelmingly positive experiences at the polls.
Public interest groups know voter identification is emotionally charged, which is one reason it has been a reliable fundraising issue. But the reality is more complicated.
First, what is meant by “voter ID” is often unclear. Identification when registering to vote? Identification when voting in person? Does it have to be photo identification? And what about ID when voting by mail?
Almost all states require some proof of identity when registering to vote. In Arizona, my home state, registrants typically provide either a Social Security number or an Arizona driver’s license number. That number is used to confirm that the registrant is a real person. Some states, again including Arizona, also require that the registrant provide a birth certificate or passport as proof of citizenship. (Driver’s licenses that some states issue to illegal immigrants are designated differently than regular driver’s licenses.)
If you’re voting in person, 36 states require that you present an identification document. As Musk noted, California and New York are among the 14 states that do not.
For voting by mail, requirements shift rather than disappear. Fewer states require a physical ID, but other verification mechanisms take its place.
In Georgia, for example, voters must include an identification number, often a driver’s license number, on the return ballot envelope. In Utah, voters must sign the return ballot envelope, and election workers compare that signature with signatures in the voter’s registration record. That isn’t the same as presenting a driver’s license to a poll worker, but it’s still voter identification.
Once definitions are established, debates over voter ID often devolve into mutual accusations: Supporters of voter ID allegedly want to suppress turnout, particularly among racial minorities. And opponents of voter ID allegedly want to enable massive voter fraud.
But both of these claims are empirically weak.
In a 2021 paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons studied the effects of “strict ID” on “a panel data set with 1.6 billion observations” in the United States from 2008 to 2018. They found that strict ID “laws have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.” The researchers also found that strict ID has “no effect on fraud, actual or perceived.” Other studies have found similar results. I recognize that this is not the moment when “trust the experts” is a particularly persuasive slogan. And the academic findings may offend your common sense: Surely, voter ID must matter somehow.
Yet some high-profile evidence supports academic findings that voter identification isn’t terribly meaningful. After all, Georgia’s alleged “Jim Crow 2.0” law, as Biden termed it, didn’t manifest in mass disenfranchisement for Georgians. Nor did any state suffer a serious, documented decline in voter participation resulting from “election integrity” laws passed in the wake of 2020.
While election integrity laws passed in recent years haven’t depressed voter participation, they also haven’t resulted in a spate of arrests and prosecutions for attempted voter fraud since 2020. And despite the thousands of hours spent by government-commissioned auditors and independent investigators, nobody has yet produced any good-enough-for-court evidence of material, contest-altering voter fraud in the 2020, 2022 or 2024 federal elections. So how can voter identification meaningfully decrease fraud that apparently barely exists?
The next time you see someone on the left or the right trying to whip up a frenzy over voter ID, you can be confident that any skepticism you might feel is entirely justified.
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