Democrats lost the voter ID debate. Move on. | Opinion
Showing ID is a reasonable barrier to voting. Democrats are not gaining anything by catastrophizing these Republican-backed laws.
Indiana is tightening its voter ID requirement. Democrats are yet again opposing it.
Sen. Blake Doriot, R-Goshen, authored Senate Bill 10, which bans college students from using school-issued IDs to vote. Gov. Mike Braun signed it on April 16. Now, college students who want to vote in Indiana will need driver's licenses, photo ID cards, passports or military IDs.
Progressives have criticized the legislation as another act of voter suppression, pointing to Indiana's poor voter turnout. But voter ID is an issue in which both sides lack supporting evidence for their arguments, and the stakes are lower than anyone is willing to admit.
It's time to move on.
Voter ID requirements don't hurt election turnout
Both parties have spent a lot of energy arguing over these policies. Indiana passed its original voter ID law in 2005 and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in 2008.
Voter ID has held attention for two decades in large part because Republicans and Democrats have long agreed that these laws help Republicans win elections. But research shows voter ID requirements hurt turnout barely or not at all, and they do not sway elections one way or the other.
Beyond that, these laws are extremely popular. The Pew Research Center finds that 95% of Republicans and 69% of Democrats agree with requiring all voters to show government-issued ID.
We just saw that popularity in action April 1. A Wisconsin electorate that overwhelmingly voted for a liberal-controlled state supreme court also overwhelmingly voted to enshrine a voter ID requirement in the state constitution.
Americans might not agree on much, but we agree on this: Voter ID laws make sense.
Don't blame voter ID laws for Gen Z's low turnout
Democrats have lost this debate. They're unwilling to accept the L, in part, because they correctly point out that Republicans have failed to prove voter fraud happens without photo IDs.
My own bias is to agree with Democrats that we shouldn't put up unnecessary barriers to voting, especially when they burden people who might not have easy access to appropriate documentation, such as elderly nuns in Indiana.
At the same time, though, showing ID is a reasonable step for most people in most cases. I have one, you probably have one and so does almost everyone with the time and inclination to vote.
There are always going to be some barriers to voting, most notably including transportation. Democrats gain nothing by catastrophizing laws that voters – the literal constituency for voter ID policies – have broadly accepted as sensible.
That is especially true of the latest Indiana debate centering on college students. Republicans want to put up hurdles because college students lean left, so they're arguing that student IDs are not rigorous enough. Democrats want it to be as easy as possible for students to show up and vote for them, so they're arguing that university-issued IDs should be sufficient. In the end, this isn't going to matter.
College students are among the most upwardly mobile and well-resourced members of our society. They can figure out how to get a driver's license if they want to.
Unfortunately, most of them don't want to vote at all. College students are low-propensity voters, historically turning out at rates well below the overall population. You can't blame voter ID laws for that.
Again, to be clear, I don't support creating new rules without justification. I also don't support fighting rules in apocalyptic terms when they are popular and not hurting much. That's what Democrats are doing now.
Sometimes in politics, you make your best case, you lose and it's just not that big of a deal. That's where Democrats find themselves on voter ID.
James Briggs is the opinion editor at the Indianapolis Star, where this column originally appeared. Contact Briggs at james.briggs@indystar.com or follow him on X and Bluesky: @JamesEBriggs