Voter ID Is Common Sense, But It Won't Fix Anything

Authored by Connor O'Keefe via The Mises Institute,

As panic builds within the GOP over the approaching midterm elections, Republicans have renewed a push for one of their most popular policy proposals: voter ID.

In the latest version of the so-called SAVE America Act—formerly just the SAVE Act—Congressional Republicans added a requirement for every voter in federal elections to provide poll workers with a valid government-issued photo ID if they’re voting in person or a copy of a valid photo ID if they’re voting by mail.

On Friday—a day after the House passed the law and sent it to the Senate—President Trump put out a post in support of voter ID requirements, which led Senate Democrats to issue familiar denunciations of the policy while promising to block this version of the bill.

The arguments in favor of voter ID are pretty straightforward. If every eligible American citizen is entitled to one vote, poll workers and election officials should confirm that the person voting is who they say they are, so that people cannot submit extra or fraudulent votes by pretending to be someone else. And the best way to do that is the same way identities are confirmed in most other clerical settings—with an officially-recognized photo ID.

The vast majority of Americans, including over 70 percent of Democrats, are in favor of this measure. But that hasn’t stopped top Democratic leaders and many of the Left’s most vocal activists from blocking legislation and loudly opposing any step towards a federal voter ID law.

However, the arguments most often made against voter ID do not stand up well to even the slightest scrutiny. 

First, opponents will often point out—correctly—that there is no undisputable evidence of “widespread” voter fraud. They’ll then use that fact to argue that voter ID is a burdensome solution to a fake problem.

But if there was an actual conspiracy to either foment or permit voter fraud in a way that successfully flipped an election, it would not be “widespread,” it would be targeted. Even in large national elections like the presidential race, the outcome is almost always decided by a small handful of precincts. So a conspiracy to commit or allow “widespread” voter fraud would not only be pointless, it would all but guarantee its discovery.

Next, critics often assert that an ID requirement would prevent millions of legitimate voters from casting their ballots because they do not currently have a valid photo ID. But if that’s really true, the emphasis has been in the wrong place. The difficulties faced by people without any form of photo ID go far beyond voting, since ID requirements have become an increasingly frequent aspect of American public life. The obvious way for politicians to fix that problem would be to make it easier for people to get photo IDs, not to leave all those clerical barriers in place while preserving a gap that could allow people to commit voter fraud.

Finally, with the SAVE America Act specifically, its opponents in Congress are trying to frame this as an illegal “nationalization” of elections. There may be something to this argument if Trump tries to do this through executive action. But the Constitution gives Congress a fair amount of control over federal elections, which it has used with recent legislation like the National Voter Registration Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Help America Vote Act.

Overall, it’s quite clear that the arguments against voter ID are not genuine arguments but excuses to preserve a status quo that has been advantageous to the party making them.

The lopsided polling on this issue indicates that most people, in both parties, aren’t falling for these talking points anymore.

So even if the SAVE America Act stalls in the Senate, it is certainly possible that some version of voter ID will become federal law in the near future.

But while that would probably be great for Republican politicians, candidates, and RNC officials focused on beating Democrats in elections, there is no reason to think it alone will genuinely put this country on a better path.

Because, while there are indeed some meaningful differences between the parties which keep elections from becoming an entirely meaningless ritual, the lesson of the last twenty years—at least—is that people tend to significantly overestimate how much elections matter, and, in doing so, get distracted from the most malicious and damaging government programs, which tend to have quiet, bipartisan support.

In the past two decades, almost every single presidential election has been won by a so-called “change” candidate who presented themselves as a sharper departure from the status quo than their opponent.

Obama won in 2008 by presenting himself as a repudiation of the financial cronyism and foreign interventionism of the W. Bush years. Trump won in 2016 by campaigning against the foreign wars, lax immigration restrictions, and crony neoliberalism of both the establishment Democrats and Republicans. Even in 2020, Biden rode to victory on a wave of utter exhaustion with the chaos of Trump’s media war with the establishment and the pandemonium set off by the government’s response to the covid pandemic—presenting himself as an abrupt deviation back to the “normalcy” of the Obama years. Finally, in his second victory, Trump and his team presented themselves as being ready and able to really deliver all the change he had promised the first time around, having totally learned from their mistakes in the first term.

But each and every time, the “change” candidate ended up delivering the exact kind of crony, inflationist, interventionist status quo with, at most, a few minor and easily-reversible executive actions to keep their base happy for a bit.

As Ryan McMaken laid out in an article earlier this month, this shouldn’t surprise anybody who understands where power truly resides in this country. It does not lie mostly with the handful of bombastic politicians and political appointees who fill the heavily-televised halls and briefing rooms on Capitol Hill, at the White House, and in the various executive agencies, as we learn in elementary school.

The bulk of federal power lies with a large group of governing elites, most of whom are faceless, seemingly unimportant bureaucrats, “nonpartisan” federal officials, and well-connected heads of industry. And that class of people—call them the establishment, the political class, the elites, whatever—are not willing or interested in surrendering their power.

Primarily by using their institutional control to determine which candidates voters get the option of voting for, the established governing elites have brought about a comfortable political status quo for them where both major parties spend all their time fighting ferociously over issues that—while certainly not unimportant—pose no actual risk to the establishment’s interventionist, inflationist, crony rackets that are quietly expanding their power and transferring a tremendous amount of the American public’s wealth to the elites and their friends.

This has been great for the establishment. But the whole scheme requires keeping the population blind to how badly it’s being ripped off. And, as I hinted at above, one of the main ways the current governing elites in America do that is by aggressively playing up the differences between establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats, to keep us all in a state of perpetual certainty that nearly all of our current societal problems will be, if not solved, greatly diminished if “our party” just wins the next election.

Look back at the unbridled joy and overwhelming sense of accomplishment and hope that voters on both sides felt after their party won each of the elections I talked about before. With Obama in 2008, Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Trump again in 2024, there was a palpable sense among their supporters after the election that the battle was won, and things would now, finally, be alright. The same goes for a lot of midterm elections—most famously the “Republican Revolution” in 1994 and the Democrats’ “Blue Wave” in 2018.

All that optimism looks almost delusional in hindsight, knowing where we’ve ended up. But that isn’t really the fault of the voters in question. They were deliberately tricked. Because there is no better way for the current elites to fortify their power than to convince roughly half of the population at any given time that they are in control now, that they are in power, that they are winning.

If we’re ever going to truly escape this awful status quo—as a sizable portion of the American public clearly desires—it won’t come from a policy like voter ID. It will happen once “both sides” understand that they are losing.