In the months leading up to each presidential election, the issue of voter ID tends to arise in every social class of US citizen. From a small town council to the US Supreme Court, the pros and cons of voter ID are heatedly debated. Attorney General Alan Wilson said, “The rule requiring photo identification is a logical step in a country that requires photo ID for everything from cashing checks to buying cold medicine: Shouldn’t there be a basic protection for the integrity of the voting process”(qtd. in Dean.) Most states at the moment require only a spoken name to be eligible to vote. This results in abuses which harm the election process. The US government should implement voter ID laws in order to protect voter integrity and ensure accurate …show more content…
Opponents argue that voter identification is not required because there are few accounts of voter fraud in recent history. This can be easily disproved with a look at various studies. While the NC fraud rate is extremely small, resulting in only .00174% fraud, this is due to how misleading these statistics are, given the severe under enforcement and under reporting by election boards (Berardelli). Workers for ACORN, the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now, conduct large scale registration drives across the country. In a recent study, ACORN workers submitted some 400,000 bogus voter registrations (Dean). These registrations were passed without a second glance. This shows how easily voter registration can be manipulated illegally. At the moment in several states, all that is required to vote is to be a registered voter and simply tell the voting officials your name. They then hand the voter a ballot which can be filled out and filed without any other precaution. Since it is extremely simple to submit a fake registration, how simple is it for thousands of illegal citizens to register and then vote. The NYC Department of Investigations led a project in which investigators claimed to be deceased or ineligible voters and were offered ballots to vote (Berardelli). This shows that modern precautions on voting are not good enough to ensure that ineligible or illegal individuals do not participate in the election process. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote, “There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders” (qtd. in Savage). As Roberts writes, it is a basic right as a citizen of the United States to be able to vote in an election. Implementing photo identification would not take away any US citizens’ right to vote. Many opposed to voter ID say photo identification would be inaccessible to