Last week, a Senate committee accepted a substitute version of an elections bill that would make it impossible for most Ohioans to vote without a photo ID. Additional committee hearings are scheduled for the bill this week, and Republicans appear ready to approve it alongside a slew of other election changes before the end of the year.
The bill would toughen current voter ID requirements, under which voters can show an alternative form of ID with their current name and address, like a recent bank statement, at the polls if they don’t have a photo ID. Ohio would become one of eight states to pass “strict” photo ID requirements, joining Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee and Wisconsin.
Voter ID policies have existed for decades. But they picked up steam in 2005, after a bipartisan commission featuring ex-President Jimmy Carter and James Baker, the former Reagan White House chief of staff, recommended universal ID cards for voters as part of a slew of recommendations to increase voting access while preserving elections integrity.
And they really took off after 2008, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld photo-ID requirements in Georgia and Indiana, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Proponents have called photo ID a commonsense measure, saying it prevents voter impersonation. They often point to public-opinion polls, which in Ohio and nationally have found upwards of 80 percent support among voting-age adults, including a strong majority of Democrats.
Opponents meanwhile say it needlessly imposes hurdles for voters without current IDs, who tend to be students, the elderly and the poor, given that documented voter fraud is incredibly rare.
Given the controversy, the effects of strict voter ID requirements have attracted voluminous study from political scientists. But while some studies have suggested photo ID requirements can depress voter turnout, others have been inconclusive, in part due to the challenges of trying to isolate the effects of voting laws from larger political factors like candidate quality and public interest in any given election.
Wendy Underhill, an elections policy analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures, said there’s a long-term trend toward more states passing voter ID requirements, and for states with existing voter ID laws to make them tougher.
Generally, three to eight states have adopted some form of voter ID legislation each year during that period, Underhill said. The states generally are Republican-controlled.
“It’s an ongoing topic, and an ongoing interest from the part of legislators to ensure that the people who are showing up at the polls are indeed the same people registered on the rolls,” Underhill said.
Currently, 35 states require voters to provide some form of identification at the polls, according to the NCSL. This is a mix of “strict” states, and “non-strict” states, which allow for broad exemptions, like how Ohio does currently.
What Would the Bill Require?
Under the current working version of the bill, House Bill 458, voters would be required to bring a photo ID with them to their polling place or early voting location, according to an analysis completed last week by the Legislative Service Commission, the state legislature’s nonpartisan research arm.
Voters lacking a qualifying ID could cast a provisional ballot, which only would be counted if they then return to their local elections office with a photo ID within seven days. An earlier version of the bill required the address on a voter’s ID to match current address, although that provision has been dropped.
Unlike some states, which require voters to provide a copy of their photo ID while voting by mail, a voter could avoid showing an ID by voting by mail, according to the new proposed law. To obtain an absentee ballot, a voter could meet the proposed new ID requirements by providing both their driver’s license/state ID number and the last four digits of their social security number with their mail-voting application and their completed ballot. That’s compared to current requirements, under which a voter could provide just one of those two numbers.
Under the proposed new law, acceptable forms of ID would be driver’s license or a state ID card. The bill would make state IDs available for free to those with qualifying documents proving identity and citizenship, similar to the process of obtaining a driver’s license.
Military IDs and those issued by the state veterans affairs department also would be accepted.
The bill is stricter than some other states with strict photo ID requirements when it comes to acceptable document – for instance, Georgia and Wisconsin allow voters to use student ID cards issued by state universities. Ohio would not.
The Ohio bill also would not accept passports, something that’s OK in Arkansas, a strict photo ID state, or Medicaid and Medicare cards, which was an exemption included in a strict photo ID bill in Wyoming.
“We want to make sure people have access to the ballot, and we want to make sure when they get to the ballot they’re both counted and counted correctly, and they have confidence knowing we’re doing things right in Ohio,” said Sen. Theresa Gavarone, a Bowling Green Republican who is overseeing the bill in the Senate.
The new Ohio bill includes exceptions for people with religious objections to being photographed, like the Amish. Someone asserting a religious exemption would be required to fill out an affidavit documenting their objection.
Supporters of photo ID call it a commonsense security measure that will help promote voter confidence.
“It’s just basic security, and the same kind of basic security that we apply to so many other things that we do,” said Hans von Spakovsky, an elections policy advocate with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative national think tank.
But opponents say it will needlessly disenfranchise people.
“When a lot of people look at a photo ID requirement, they have one, and so they don’t think it’s a problem,” said Collin Marozzi, deputy policy director for the ACLU of Ohio. “But when you start looking at the number of Ohioans who don’t have one, I think that changes things.”
“And I do think there is a higher level of scrutiny here because we’re talking about someone’s right to vote. We’re not talking about renting a car or buying cigarettes. We’re talking about a fundamental right as an American citizen.”
How Many Adult Ohioans Lack ID?
Because of how state records are kept, it can be difficult to quantify exactly how many eligible voters lack photo identification. Estimates vary.
Voting-rights activists often say 11 percent, citing a 2006 report from the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning advocacy group.
Project Vote, an advocacy group, found in 2015 that 7 percent of adult U.S. citizens could not verify they had a government-issued photo ID. The U.S. Federal Highway Administration found in 2020 that 228 million people held driver’s licenses, meaning 12 percent of the U.S. adult population didn’t have one.
The Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles estimated in 2011 that 500,000 adult Ohioans lacked a state government-issued ID, according to a report from the Ohio Legislative Service Commission. That was about 5.5 percent of the state’s adult population at the time.
More recent estimates weren’t immediately available.
Research suggests that minorities of voting age are more likely to lack ID – the 2015 study from Project Vote found 13 percent of Black respondents, or twice the average, didn’t have verified ID.
And in 2019, cleveland.com estimated that nearly one out of every five 18-year-old Ohioans lacked a driver’s license, a continuation of a longstanding trend of fewer people getting their license early in life.
What Effects Do Voter ID Laws Actually Have?
Opponents to strict voter ID laws assert they depress voter participation by creating new barriers to vote.
But research on the subject has been mixed.
“That argument [that photo ID arguments depress turnout among some groups] has been made ever since the first ID laws went into place,” said von Spakovsky, the official with the conservative Heritage Foundation. “And they not only have failed in court almost uniformly, but the turnout numbers in states like Indiana and Georgia show they simply don’t have that effect.”
A 2014 study from the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of U.S. Congress, found turnout dropped in two states that implemented strict voter ID requirements ahead of the 2012 presidential election – Arkansas and Kansas – more than other comparable states.
But a widely-cited 2017 study from the University of California, Davis was inconclusive, finding “modest, if any, turnout effects of voter identification laws.” Other research suggests that while stricter voter ID laws plausibly could restrict turnout, they also could prompt voter backlash and counter-mobilizing that could increase it.
Republican state lawmakers in Missouri earlier this year adopted a strict photo ID requirement, similar to what Ohio is considering. Voter turnout for the November election was 51 percent, compared to 58 percent for the last comparable election in 2018. That compares to Ohio, which had similar voting laws in both elections, and saw turnout drop from 56 percent in 2018 to 52 percent earlier this year.
One response among voting-rights advocates to tough voter ID requirements is to specifically invest in mobilizing voters without ID.
One group, VoteRiders, helps voters jump through the hoops of getting ID cards in the eight states it targets – Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin, according to Lauren Kunis, the group’s executive director.
The group targets states that recently changed their voting rules and/or those that have competitive federal elections. Kunis said it likely would look to build an operation in Ohio if a strict photo ID law is passed here.
Even though states make ID cards for voting available for free, Kunis said challenges voters face when complying include finding the relevant documents, making appointments at the right government agencies and then physically traveling there during limited business hours.
VoteRiders works with community partners, including homeless shelters, food banks, employment agencies and services that help ex-offenders re-enter society after being released from jail, Kunis said.
It also complements outreach efforts by elections officials to educate the public on voter ID requirements in their state.
“There are no shortcuts and it takes time,” Kunis said. “The people who are most likely to lack identification are the most marginalized in society writ large and hard to reach.”
©2022 Advance Local Media LLC. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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