Voter ID Laws

Voter ID laws won't work until the voter rolls are cleaned up, but they're still better than not having voter ID laws.  No, they don't disenfranchise people, especially minorities:

The new Democratic majority is making a major push to outlaw states from asking their voters to show ID at the polls, arguing that such laws push minorities and older people from voting.

According to a major new study, they’re wrong — strict voter ID laws have no significant effect on voter turnout, don’t keep interested voters from being able to vote, and for that matter don’t prevent them from registering.

But at the same time, the laws also don’t appear to boost confidence in the voting system, the study concluded, undercutting the reasons some conservatives are eager to pass such laws.

“The bottom line is that we don’t find much of an effect either on participation or voter fraud,” said Vincent Pons, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, which posted the new study this month.

What a silly thing to say. They're not designed to boost participation, they're designed to help ensure that the only people who vote are those entitled to vote.