Why Are Voter ID Laws So Controversial? | FRONTLINE: What’s the Deal with Voters’ Rights?
Video Transcript

SARAH CHILDRESS: Hi, I'm Sarah Childress. I'm a reporter for Frontline, and today, I'm answering your questions about voting. So, a lot of you have asked about voter ID laws, asking why they're so controversial. What's the deal? 

The first reason they're so controversial is because they're partisan. They're overwhelmingly passed by Republicans and overwhelmingly criticized by Democrats. 

The second reason is the question of how effective they really are. Republican lawmakers who have passed these laws say they're doing so to stamp out voter fraud. The only kind of fraud that these laws actually stop is voter impersonation fraud. That's when someone goes to the polls and votes in the name of another eligible voter. That kind of fraud is really rare: only about three percent of cases in one study that we looked at. Much more common is double voting, when someone votes as themselves in two different locations, or vote buying, when someone bribes or otherwise pays someone to vote for another candidate. An absentee ballot fraud is also much more prevalent, when people mail in ballots that aren't their own. 

The other reason this is a concern for many people is that some of them have been ruled to be discriminatory. It can be difficult for some people to obtain an ID. The state of Texas said that 800,000 registered voters did not have an ID that would be acceptable at the polls. In North Carolina, it's 300,000. Wisconsin, 300,000. In Pennsylvania, it was about a half million voters that didn't have a proper ID at the polls. Those voters tend to disproportionately be African American, Latino, elderly voters, low-income voters, and students, college-aged voters.