It’s the Thanksgiving season, when families and friends gather to eat turkey, watch football … and get into bare-knuckled fights about politics. One minute, you’re making small talk about crafting with your mom’s weird but harmless neighbor. The next, someone you barely know — Aunt Janet’s second husband, or your brother’s new girlfriend, or the loner uncle you haven’t seen in 15 years — gets disinhibited by one too many, and starts going off about the illegal immigrants who stuffed the ballot boxes for Hillary in 2016, and … well, things get ugly real fast.
The MAGA crowd has latched onto the idea that there is rampant ballot fraud, so we need stiffer voter ID laws to combat it. But this is complete malarkey. In fact, there is no documented history of widespread registration or voting by non-citizens. Furthermore, there is clear evidence that strict voter ID laws prevent some legal citizens from casting ballots, which is a bad thing.
If you want to go toe-to-toe with your Trumpy cousin about voter ID laws this holiday season, we’ve got the data and rhetoric you need — read on.
In this post:
The “voter ID” issue is a mash-up of two separate issues: illegal registration and in-person voter fraud
Reports of widespread illegal registration have been debunked
Reports of rampant in-person voter fraud are also false
Voter ID laws impede legal citizens’ right to vote
Concluding thoughts
1. The “voter ID” issue is actually a mash-up of two issues that need to be considered separately.
Anti-immigrant MAGA folks often conflate two separate issues related to voting: illegal registration, and fraudulent casting of ballots. These are distinct, and need to be considered separately:
Illegal registration (before election day) — This is about what happens before election day, not at the polling place, so it’s not strictly related to voter ID laws. But anti-immigration folks often link these issues together, and also argue that proposals to give undocumented people driver’s licenses would allow them to cast fraudulent ballots.
Fraudulent voting on election day — Requiring an ID at the polls is mainly meant to prevent someone from either (a) impersonating someone else at the voting place, in order to vote when one isn’t registered to do so, or (b) casting multiple ballots (as different people). This is the main theoretical issue that voter ID laws attempt to solve.
2. Reports that large numbers of illegal immigrants are registered to vote have been debunked.
Even though “illegal voter registration” is only loosely tied to the issue of voter IDs, it's worth addressing, because many Republicans link them together.
Every single report that large numbers of non-citizens make it onto the voting rolls (and vote) has been debunked; here is a comprehensive, thorough review from the Brennan Center in 2017 that you should skim (see the full PDF in the link). Bottom line: this is a complete and total non-issue.
Here’s a specific example that might come up in discussions with the Fox News crowd: In January, Trumpies crowed that officials had discovered 95,000 illegally registered voters on the rolls in Texas. But almost immediately, that number was shown to be total BS (see here, here), and in the end, only 80 illegal voters were identified (see here). The same pattern has held true in pretty much every state that has examined illegal voting by non-citizens (again, see the Brennan Center’s extensive review) -- it happens occasionally, but it’s very, very, very rare.
Of course, the initial claims of illegal voting got a lot more attention from Fox and social media than the fact that they were debunked, so don’t be surprised that your Trumpy cousin thinks illegal voting is a big issue, even though that is objectively not true.
As an aside, it’s worth digging into the proposal to give driver’s licenses to undocumented people. It’s true that in many states, a non-citizen with a driver’s license could theoretically register to vote. But as the data cited above show, this is a miniscule problem. Why? Probably because it’s a felony to unlawfully register to vote, and most folks don't knowingly commit felonies, especially not to cast a single ballot. Contrary to many Trump loyalists’ views, there is zero evidence to suggest that making it easier for non-citizens to get driver’s licenses would cause any increase in illegal voting.
3. Voter ID laws are meant to prevent fraud on election day -- but this, too, is not a significant issue.
So, if we can accept the data that the voting rolls are >99.9% comprised of legal citizens, then we can focus on the main voter ID issue, which is about what happens when citizens who are legally entitled to vote show up to the polls on election day.
As noted above, voter ID rules can solve the theoretical problem of voter impersonation/fraud — i.e., I go to the polls and claim to be some other (registered) voter, in order to either (a) vote when I’m not entitled to, or (b) cast multiple ballots — by requiring me to show a picture ID at the polling place. But just like illegal registration, voter fraud is essentially a non-issue, and virtually all reports have been debunked.
As with illegal registration, all past claims of large numbers of illegal voters have, on further investigation, been proven to involve much smaller numbers — often zero or close to zero. (Slate’s analysis of the 2012 election has some details about how these studies are done, and why falsely high results are common.) But even accounting for "questionable" cases, the maximum rate of voter fraud appears to be about 0.001% (one in 100,000) votes. See here for a comprehensive report, with full references.
The right-leaning Heritage Foundation, which is extremely supportive of voter IDs, keeps a database (here) of confirmed voter fraud cases. This list contains only 1,217 confirmed cases of voter fraud since the mid-1990s in the entire country, during which time at least a billion ballots were cast. By our math, that’s a documented rate of about 0.0001% (one in a million) votes.
4. Not only are voter ID laws unnecessary, but they also risk harming the rights of legal citizens.
At this point, your Trumpy cousin may say: Fine, so maybe illegal registration and fraudulent voting aren’t big issues. But even so, what’s the big deal about requiring IDs at polling places?
Although there’s debate about the magnitude of the negative effect voter IDs have on citizens’ rights, there is virtually no disagreement about the fact that those negative effects exist:
Getting a driver's license takes time and money, which hinders the poorest citizens’ ability to vote (see scholarship on this topic here, here). This is essentially a poll tax, which is legally and morally wrong. And this ultra-poor population definitely exists; over 300,000 people in the US live on under $2 a day (see here and here).
Some folks get confused by voter ID laws, and stay home because they don’t know if they have the right documents. This is a particular issue in poor and minority communities, where good information is lacking and a lot of people distrust the government. To be fair, it’s hard to precisely measure how many people are affected in this way, and what to do about it — here's a good discussion, and here’s a recent research paper examining the issue — but it definitely happens, at a rate that’s certainly larger than the rate of fraud.
Bottom line: it’s fine to question the exact number of people who would be negatively affected by voter ID laws — but the data referenced above suggest it’s far more than the (miniscule) number of fraudulent voters.
Finally, some voter ID proponents argue that the state could provide and distribute voter IDs for free, and thus get around the discrimination issues. That’s technically true…but is it really worth spending several million dollars a year (see here) of each state’s tax dollars to prevent a handful of fraudulent ballots every election?
5. Concluding thoughts
There is no evidence to support requiring voters to show IDs at the polls. Based on the best available data, the hypothetical problems with fraudulent registration and ballots are essentially non-existent, and voter IDs would likely create even larger issues for law-abiding citizens.
If you care deeply about preserving all citizens’ right to vote, please consider following and supporting some fabulous organizations that are active in this area:
The Brennan Center is leading the way in scholarship and advocacy on voters’ rights, including by writing smart, data-driven analyses to dispel bogus claims.
Since 1965, the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project has been litigating key cases to protect and expand enfrachisement.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice helps protect voting rights in communities of color by supporting fair redistricting and battling photo ID requirements, registration and early voting restrictions, and Election Day voter challenges.
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Image via Truth In Media.