Why Doesn’t Everyone Have a Voter ID? | 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. 

Harland Abraham writes: "Why doesn't every adult 18 and over have a government-issued ID?" 

That's a great question. Let's think about what kinds of IDs are issued by the government. There's a Social Security card. There's your passport. There's a driver's license. There's a citizenship certificate. There's a military I.D. if you work for the military. And there's a non-driver's I.D., usually issued by your state. 

So, a Social Security card only has your name and your signature. It doesn't work for photo ID at the polls because it doesn't have your photo, and it doesn't have a current address. So that's out. Passports are expensive and less than half of Americans have one. A driver's license -- well, if you don't drive or you don't have a car, you're not going to have one of those. A citizenship certificate -- if you were born in the U.S., you don't have one of those. Obviously a military I.D. is only for members of the military. 

That leaves us with non-driver's I.D. and there are several barriers to getting one of those. One of them is your birth certificate, which you need in order to get this I.D. Not everyone has a birth certificate. Sometimes those records have been lost or destroyed. Sometimes they're in other states. So getting that document can be difficult, and it can be costly. So those are the kinds of barriers that people experience when they try to get these kinds of I.D.s. 

That might seem like a small population, but it turns out it's not. In Texas, for example, one of the most populous states in the country, the state estimated that 800,000 registered voters didn't have an I.D. In North Carolina, it's 300,000. In Wisconsin, 300,000. In Pennsylvania, it was about a half million voters who didn't have proper I.D. at the polls.