Voter ID Laws

Voter identification laws require a person presenting to vote to prove who they are, usually by producing a government-issued document. The requirement is unremarkable across most of the democratic world: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands all issue national identity cards and expect them at the polls. In the United States it has become one of the most litigated questions in election law, and in Canada and the United Kingdom it has been settled by legislation within the past two decades.

The conservative case rests on a simple proposition about administrative design: an entitlement exercised without verification is an entitlement the administrator cannot account for. The opposing case rests on an equally concrete proposition: the documents in question are unevenly held, and a rule that burdens the poor, the elderly, the indigenous and the transient is not neutral in effect regardless of its wording. Both propositions are true, and the argument turns on how each is weighted.

Key Takeaways

• Canada has required identification to vote federally since 2007, and permits a voter without documents to be vouched for by an elector from the same polling division.
• The United Kingdom introduced photo identification for polling-station voting under the Elections Act 2022, first applied at the English local elections of May 2023.
• The United States Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s photo identification statute in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board in 2008, six votes to three, without finding evidence of the fraud the law was said to prevent.
• The bipartisan Carter-Baker commission recommended photo identification in 2005 while insisting that states issue the card free and take active steps to reach voters lacking one.
• The conservative position depends on the free-issuance condition; identification requirements without accessible free documents amount to a fee on voting.

History And Context

Identification at the polls presupposes a voter register, and registers are a nineteenth-century invention. Before them, eligibility was determined at the polling place by challenge, oath, and the memory of local officials. The American registration systems that spread after 1870 were introduced partly to check urban machine fraud and partly, in the South after 1890, to disenfranchise black voters by administrative discretion. Both purposes are present in the record, and the second one is why the subject carries the charge it does.⁵

The modern American sequence begins in 2005. Indiana enacted Senate Enrolled Act 483, requiring photo identification issued by the state or federal government, with free cards available from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. That September, the Commission on Federal Election Reform chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker III recommended photo identification nationally, tied to the REAL ID card, coupled with free issuance and affirmative outreach by states to voters without documents.² The Supreme Court upheld the Indiana statute in April 2008. Justice Stevens, writing for the plurality, found the state’s interest in election integrity legitimate and the record of burden on individual voters too thin to sustain a facial challenge.¹

Shelby County v. Holder in June 2013 removed the coverage formula that had subjected certain states to federal preclearance of election-law changes.³ Texas announced implementation of its identification law within hours. Several statutes enacted in the following years were struck down on evidentiary records showing they had been designed with knowledge of racial usage patterns, most prominently North Carolina’s 2013 omnibus act, invalidated by the Fourth Circuit in 2016.

Canada took a different route with less conflict. Bill C-31 in 2007 introduced identification requirements to the Canada Elections Act, with a list of accepted documents maintained by the Chief Electoral Officer that runs to dozens of items, including utility bills, band membership cards and attestations from shelters. The Fair Elections Act of 2014 removed vouching and the voter information card; the Elections Modernization Act of 2018 restored both. The United Kingdom moved last, requiring photo identification at polling stations under the Elections Act 2022, with a free Voter Authority Certificate for those without qualifying documents.⁴

The Conservative Position

The conservative argument is administrative before it is partisan. Every other transaction of comparable consequence — opening a bank account, collecting a parcel, boarding a domestic flight, filling a prescription — requires proof of identity, and a franchise administered to a lower standard than a courier delivery invites the suspicion that its administrators are indifferent to it. The point is not that fraud is occurring at scale. The point is that a process which cannot demonstrate who voted cannot answer the accusation when it is made.

Public confidence is the operative good. Polling in the United States, Canada and Britain has consistently found identification requirements popular across party lines and among minority voters, which conservatives read as evidence that the requirement matches ordinary intuitions about how a serious procedure works. An election is not only a mechanism for aggregating preferences; it is a public ritual whose authority depends on being seen to be conducted properly. Burke’s account of institutions as inherited capital applies directly: confidence accumulates slowly and is spent quickly.

The conservative position also carries a condition that its own advocates have not always honoured. Carter-Baker made free issuance and active state outreach part of the recommendation, not an afterthought to it. An identification requirement without a genuinely free and accessible document is a poll tax administered by other means, and the Twenty-Fourth Amendment settled that question in 1964. Where conservative legislatures have paired the requirement with free cards, extended hours at issuing offices, and mobile issuance in rural and reserve communities, the empirical case against them weakens considerably. Where they have not, the objection stands and conservatives should concede it.

Canada’s model is the strongest example available to the right, and it is the one American conservatives cite least. A long list of acceptable documents, a vouching provision, and an independent electoral administrator have produced a requirement that operates without serious litigation.

Differing Positions

The opposing case begins with distribution. A 2023 survey by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement with the Brennan Center and VoteRiders found that about one per cent of American citizens of voting age hold no government-issued photo identification at all, while roughly nine per cent lack a current, unexpired driver’s licence with their present name and address — the document most identification statutes contemplate.⁶ An earlier and widely quoted Brennan estimate of eleven per cent, drawn from a 2006 telephone survey, does not survive the newer work. The shortfall is concentrated among the elderly, the poor, students, and black and Hispanic voters, and in a close election a one-per-cent exclusion is not trivial. The burden is not the price of the card but the cost of obtaining the underlying documents — a certified birth certificate, a married woman’s name-change record — and the time and travel required to reach an issuing office with limited hours.

The second argument is about proportion. If the offence prevented is in-person impersonation, the documented rate is on the order of a handful of credible incidents per hundred million ballots. A rule that deters more legitimate voters than fraudulent ones has failed on its own terms, and several studies of turnout after implementation have found measurable declines among affected groups, though the literature is contested and later analyses have found smaller effects than earlier ones.

The third argument is about intent, and it is the most damaging. Legislative records in several American states contain requests for data on the racial distribution of document holding, followed by statutes drafted to match. Courts have taken that sequence as evidence of purpose. Defenders of identification requirements cannot answer it by pointing to the abstract reasonableness of the policy, because the challenge is not to the policy in the abstract but to the particular statute and its drafters.

References

1. Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008).
2. Commission on Federal Election Reform, Building Confidence in U.S. Elections (Center for Democracy and Election Management, American University, 2005).
3. Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013).
4. Elections Act 2022 (United Kingdom), c. 37, Part 1.
5. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Basic Books, 2000).
6. Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, University of Maryland, with the Brennan Center for Justice and VoteRiders, national survey of voter identification possession (2023).