Mathews: Voter ID debate distracts from real election threats

This column is a waste of your time.

Because it’s about voter ID. And every minute spent on voter ID is a minute lost forever.

Unfortunately, California is joining a pointless national debate over whether to require voters to show government-issued identification when they vote.

The occasion is a ballot initiative, from San Diego state assemblymember Carl DeMaio, now being circulated for the November 2026 ballot.

Under current law, when Californians register to vote, we must affirm under penalty of perjury that we are U.S. citizens and must provide verification information, including our dates-of-birth, Social Security numbers or driver’s licenses.

The initiative goes further, adding a state constitutional amendment requiring voters to present government-issued identification at the polls, or the last four digits of a government-issued ID when voting by mail.

Proponents of the initiative say voter ID is necessary to prevent voter fraud.

Opponents of the initiative say voter ID will lead to voter suppression.

Both are wrong.

Voter ID doesn’t prevent voter fraud, for two reasons.

First, there is precious little voter fraud in this country. Last year, the Brookings Institution, using data from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, found that voter fraud has never altered an election outcome in the U.S. In Pennsylvania, over the past 30 years, more than 100 million voters have cast votes, with only 39 cases of voter fraud.

Second, voter fraud rarely involves the kind of fraud voter ID is supposed to prevent: people impersonating voters at the polls. The Heritage site documents just 34 cases of impersonation, The Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive institute, concluded that voter impersonation is “virtually nonexistent.”

This is unsurprising. Ask yourself, if you were trying to steal an election, would you send individuals out to impersonate voters? No, because that would involve stealing votes one by one, which is inefficient.

For election stealers, it makes much more sense to corrupt the counting of votes. Donald Trump, in brazenly attempting to steal the 2020 U.S. election, did exactly that, asking election officials and courts to tamper with the counts and throw out thousands of votes.

Today, Voter ID is backed from Trump supporters: people who declare that American elections are rigged and illegitimate — then insist that American election results give them the right to do anything they want.

Opponents of voter ID may be more sympathetic than the Trumpian proponents — but they are just as wrong on this issue.

Democrats claim that voter ID will suppress votes because poor, disabled, and non-white people are less likely to have government-issued IDs. But, in our era, multiple studies have debunked such claims.

The most compelling study, co-authored by Harvard’s Vincent Pons and the University of Bologna’s Enrico Cantoni in 2019, looked at 10 states with voter ID laws, and found that the statutes didn’t decrease voter turnout in any demographic.

Why not? One common explanation is “offsetting” or “protest” effects — the theory that voter ID discourages some voters but spurs other voters to go to the polls, to defend their voting rights.

The 2019 researchers tried to identify such “protest” effects — but did not find them.

The conclusion: Voter ID doesn’t affect voting much at all.

But it does affect our politics.

For one thing, voter ID campaigns distract attention and divert resources from fights against real election threats, which are mounting. President Trump has threatened to send federal agents and the military to intimidate voters and to interfere with ballot counts.

Even more profoundly, the attention to voter ID reinforces America’s over-emphasis on elections as tools of democracy. Elections and democracy are not the same thing. Elections often undermine democracy. Anti-democracy authoritarians —among them, Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdoğan and Trump — came to power via elections.

Democracy is self-government, the hard work of everyday people governing ourselves. When Republicans and Democrats battle over nonsense issues like voter ID, they distract us from real democracy.

And they waste our time.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.