Opinion: Get Off The Voter ID Merry-Go-Round
By John Hood
RALEIGH — North Carolinians want their election laws to include a photo ID requirement. They’ve made this clear many times. In 2018, a large majority of voters chose to add such a requirement to the state constitution.
Critics of voter ID know full well they represent a small minority of North Carolinians. They don’t care. Defining the policy as “voter suppression,” they proclaim it a waste of resources and a violation of the civil right to cast a ballot.
They are wrong about that. They are wrong at every level of analysis.
Voter ID doesn’t suppress the vote, for starters. Most scholarly studies of voter ID conclude that it has little to no effect on turnout in general, or on variations in turnout among partisan, racial, or ethnic groups. For example, a 2019 paper in the Atlantic Economic Journal found “no evidence that strict identification laws affect overall turnout or black turnout” and found a small reduction in Hispanic turnout only within one version of the authors’ model. Even when researchers find a turnout effect, it’s usually quite small. In South Carolina, implementation of voter ID “decreased turnout in the 2014 general election by 0.19%,” wrote the authors of a Political Research Quarterly study, while having “no discernible racial impact.”
Nor is voter ID intended to suppress legal votes. Most states and many foreign countries employ some version of the safeguard, including most European democracies. To accuse the likes of Norway and the Netherlands of engaging in voter suppression is preposterous.
Now, if the introduction of a voter ID law doesn’t significantly reduce turnout, then basic math tells us there can’t be rampant impersonation fraud in our election system! Otherwise, the number of ballots cast would go way down (because lots of illegal votes would be blocked). Based on this fact, critics say there’s no point in having ID laws.
They’re still wrong. Impersonation fraud is very rare but does occur on occasion, such as someone casting a ballot on behalf of a recently deceased relative. Also very occasionally, elections are settled by just a handful of votes. In 2017, partisan control of the Virginia House of Delegates had to be settled by drawing lots because the two candidates in the pivotal district each got 11,608 votes.
Besides, the best case for voter ID isn’t about impersonation. It’s about residency. A just-released study by scholars at the University of California-San Diego and the University of Alberta estimated that some 6.1 million Americans are registered to vote in more than one state. Most of these registrations are probably accidental. Folks relocate and don’t notify their former state. And only a tiny number actually attempt to vote multiple times, obviously an illegal act. But a far larger share — the authors estimate more than 300,000 in 2020 — engage in “cross-state strategic voting.”
Think of a college student who could either cast an absentee ballot in his home state or vote in person where he’s enrolled. Think of a wealthy couple with residences in multiple states. These conditions shouldn’t allow people to choose which place to vote based on where they think their votes are more likely to tip the outcome. They should vote where they’re truly domiciled. How can we tell? The possession of an ID card issued by the jurisdiction is a pretty good tell. In our state, the law already requires you to register your vehicle and get a North Carolina driver’s license if you live and drive here for more than a few weeks. And it’s not too much to ask non-drivers to get a photo ID if they want to vote here.
Indeed, having a photo ID is handy in many other ways, so providing them is a valuable public service!
Lastly, ID laws don’t deny anyone the right to vote. They serve merely to establish the identity and residency of those casting ballots. Let’s stop the litigation merry-go-round. Let’s enact a reasonable ID law and move on. Enough already.
John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
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7 Comments
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Yes it’s about time the elected officials actually listen to their constituents! They work for us not the other way around! This amendment passed and was sponsored in a non-partisan manner, time to stop playing games and allowing lawfare from out of state NGOs to dictate what happens in our state.
Rules for registering to vote in NC: “Be sure to check the citizenship box correctly, sign the form, and include your date of birth and an identifying number (NC driver’s license number or last 4 digits of your Social Security number). If you do not give your NC driver’s license number or the last 4 digits of your Social Security number, be sure to provide the documents requested on the form, or be prepared to show one of those documents when you first vote in person.”
Wouldn’t this rule catch individuals who are not legally registered to vote who attempt to vote?
Rules only work if they are enforced.
Jen R, while your statement is correct, it has no meaning. Everything only works if rules are enforced. By requiring an ID, the underlying assumption is that rules were followed to get a “valid” ID. These trite quips serve no purpose. If your argument is that one set of rules are not enforced so we need new rules. This same logic should be applied to the new rules, thus negating the needs for new rules to begin with.
So what Mr Hood is saying, is that I have to prove I’m not a liar to vote, so much for freedom. It seems the only ones caught lying in NC are the Republican’ts that have been harvesting votes. Sounds hypocritical Mr Hood.
And yet, the NC Leg doesn’t want to accept UNC system school IDs (issued by the State) or tribal IDs or social services cards or military Tricare insurance cards (all issued by the Federal government). #hypocrites
From Mr. Hood’s op-ed: “… the best case for voter ID isn’t about impersonation. It’s about residency. A just-released study by scholars at the University of California-San Diego and the University of Alberta estimated that some 6.1 million Americans are registered to vote in more than one state. Most of these registrations are probably accidental. Folks relocate and don’t notify their former state. And only a tiny number actually attempt to vote multiple times, obviously an illegal act. But a far larger share — the authors estimate more than 300,000 in 2020 — engage in “cross-state strategic voting.”
So let’s get out a calculator. 300,000 out of 158 million votes cast in the 2020 election cycle. That is 0.0019%. In the 2020 election there were 2,503,000 votes cast in NC. So there was the possibility of 4,755 votes cast by cross-state strategic voters NC according to his op-ed.