It is instructive to ask how we voted before there were photo ids…which didn’t really come into play for driver’s licences until 1970s. The Voting Rights Act (VAR) of 1965 was a response to the pattern of restriction on voting applied in certain states (mostly those that at one time had slavery); those states had to submit for federal review changes to their vote-related processes to ensure they didn’t propagate unfair restrictions or illegal practices such as literacy tests and poll taxes.Then, in 2013, a lawsuit (Shelby vs. Holder) effectively deactivated two provisions of the VAR. Immediately, some states started with laws that put aggressive voter id laws in place and other provisions that made it more difficult for certain people to vote by restricting the nature and types of ids that would be accepted. All of these laws are being challenged in court, and at least two have had major reversals, North Carolina and Texas. The states that have been pursuing the most regressive laws have universally been red states.It is hard for people who have mobility and income and flexibility in their job to understand the impact of these restrictions; be aware that the impacts are (intentionally) directed at poor, minority, and less mobile parts of our population (which tend to vote Democratic). Here’s one of several articles about the impact: https://www.washingtonpost.com/p...Furthermore, the justification for more aggressive voter id laws is usually given as protection from voter fraud (e.g., a person impersonating another voter). The evidence that voter fraud is signNow is quite rare, occuring something like .0001 of all votes cast (by the latest count from Heritage Foundation). I think the story of Ken Kobach of Kansas who has spent millions of dollars pursuing what he told the legislature was thousands of cases of voter fraud is instructive; after something like two years, he obtained NINE (9) convictions (Editorial: Kobach proves how prevalent voter fraud is).The Brennan Center for Justice studies voting issues and does a good job of providing summaries of research. There may be other issues that concern the integrity of our elections (including voter disenfranchisement, restrictions on voting periods, moving and consolidating precincts even as populations are growing, etc.), in-person voter fraud — the kind that a voter id can combat — is vanishingly rare and we must be very careful to make sure that thousands and thousands of people who should be able to vote can’t because of laws designed to protect against a rare occurrence; their rights are being impinged.*** Edited to fix a mistyping.