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.
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.
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.
THAT is why we need Voter ID. THAT is why it should be an amendment to the NC Constitution, and why I am trying to make it part of my Amendment to the US Constitution.
The important thing is, we will not settle this issue once and for all without a Federal Constitutional Amendment. And as a Congresswoman, I will be able to introduce the Amendment and champion it through the House.
