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Remember how, during the media's failed months-long crusade to push for gun control, the GOP was under siege 24/7 from left-wingers like Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough, and Wolf Blitzer armed with polls that showed 80% wanted background checks tightened, including a majority of Republicans?

Part of the media strategy (CNN turned their entire network over to the partisan cause) was relentless concern-trolling. The cries that the GOP was doomed if our 2nd Amendment rights weren't further restricted came from every corner of MediaLand: "This is an 80-20 issue!", was the talking point across every new outlet in America.

Well, guess what else is an 80-20 issue? Voter ID.

A McClatchy poll released Thursday shows that 83% of those polled believe laws requiring voters to "show identification in order to vote" is a "good thing." Only 13% see it as a "bad thing."

Moreover, a full 72% of Democrats see voter ID as a "good thing."

In fact, 65% of those who see themselves as "very liberal" favor voter ID laws.

The media coverage of this issue, though, would have you believe the complete opposite is true as they fabricate a reality that claims Mississippi is still burning thanks to a GOP pushing for unpopular laws intended to disenfranchise blacks.

According to this poll, though, no one, not even self-identified Democrats, are buying the media's cynical, partisan line of nonsense.

The media is obviously way out-of-touch on this issue, but because they are dishonest and abuse their power to shape realities that don't exist; they can pretend black is white, up is down, and lies are truth.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter

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Poll: Media Out of Touch on Voter ID Laws, 83% Approve | Breitbart

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Part of the media strategy (CNN turned their entire network over to the partisan cause) was relentless concern-trolling. The cries that the GOP was doomed if our 2nd Amendment rights weren't further restricted came from every corner of MediaLand: "This is an 80-20 issue!", was the talking point across every new outlet in America.

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Latino voters have been at the center of the voter ID law controversy, and yet according to a new poll released Thursday, they are not too bothered by it.

In its most recent study, the Pew Hispanic Center found that as many as 71 percent of Latino registered voters support the controversial law, which this year will be enforced for the first time in 11 states. Among all registered voters, the ID law, which requires voters to show photo identification in order to cast a ballot, is supported by 77 percent.

Consistent with this, 97 percent of those Latinos surveyed said they are confident they have the ID needed to vote in their state.

As for the Latino voting tendencies, the Pew study indicated, not surprisingly, that they favor President Obama 3 to 1 over Republican challenger Mitt Romney (69 percent against 21 percent), but warned that they are not as certain to go to the polls as the general public.

Even though Latino electorate has grown in size and importance, with some 23.7 million Hispanics eligible to vote this year, only 77 percent of registered Latino voters surveyed by Pew said they are "absolutely certain" the will vote in the November 6 election - as opposed to 89 percent in the general population.

Moreover, Latinos rarely turn out to vote in numbers close to their potential. According to Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director at Pew Hispanic quoted recently by Los Angeles Times, one of the factors depressing the Latino voter turnout is the comparative youth of the voting bloc. About a third of Latinos in the country are in the 18 to 29 age group, and young people generally tend to vote at much lower rates than older people.

Another factor playing a role in keeping Latino turnout rates down, added Lopez, could be that about half of the voters are in California and Texas, two states that haven't been in play for the presidential election.

Still, Latino voter groups expect that the estimated number of Latino voters who will turn in ballots in November -10 million to 12 million- will break a record. About 9.7 million Latinos voted in the presidential election four years ago.

Obama's current 69-21 lead over Romney among Latinos (with 9 percent still undecided) has barely changed throughout the 2012 campaign and throughout the last four years: in 2008 Obama carried the Hispanic vote with a 67 to 31 percent margin.

Interestingly, one of the most significant shifts among Latinos in the last four years, and one stark contrast between this group and the general population, occurred in their satisfaction level with the nation's direction. The Pew poll states that 45 percent of Latinos surveyed said they were satisfied, up from 27 percent in 2008. This trend is also reflected among the general population, but in a far more modest ratio: 28 percent in the general public said they are satisfied with the way things are going in the country (in 2008 18 percent did).

The survey was conducted among 1,765 Latino adults, in all 50 states, from September 7 through October 4, mostly before the Oct. 3 presidential debate. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.2 percent. The Pew Hispanic Center is a project of the nonpartisan research organization Pew Research Center.
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Latino Voters Strongly Support Voter ID Laws, Poll Says

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Latino voters have been at the center of the voter ID law controversy, and yet according to a new poll released Thursday, they are not too bothered by it. In its most recent study, the Pew Hispanic Center found that as many as 71 percent of Latino registered voters support the controversial law, which this year will be enforced for the first time in 11 states.

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Almost three-quarters of all Americans support the idea that people should have to show photo identification to vote, even though they are nearly as concerned about voter suppression as they are about fraud in presidential elections, according to a new Washington Post poll.

A controversy over voter ID laws is a prominent backdrop to this year's election, with courtroom showdowns in Pennsylvania, Texas and elsewhere over voting rights and otherwise mundane election procedures.

Overall, there is high, strong and cross-party support for such laws, even though a slim majority of Americans say they have heard "not much" or "nothing" about the issue. Support dips among those who say they have heard more about new photo identification requirements but remains the majority position.

About half of those polled see voter fraud - people voting who are not eligible to do so or voters casting multiple ballots - as a "major problem" in presidential elections. One in three see it as a "minor problem." The numbers are nearly as high when it comes to concern about eligible voters being denied their rights.

Asked to trade off the two, slightly more Americans are concerned with fraud than with voter suppression, although stark partisan and racial differences emerge. Two-thirds of Republicans see voter fraud as a bigger problem; nearly as many Democrats are primarily concerned with denying eligible voters access to the ballot box.

In the poll, African Americans are the most likely to see voter suppression as a major problem and the most likely to see support for the laws as an effort to boost one party over the other. Nearly six in 10 African Americans sense that support for the laws stems from partisan politics.

While 44 percent of Americans perceive partisan politics at play in the support of such laws, far more, 57 percent, see a genuine interest in fair elections as a big motivator.

A challenge for opponents of the ID laws is that a slim majority of Americans see politics behind the opposition, with fewer sensing it is motivated by a real interest in clean vote counts.

Moreover, big majorities of those whom critics see as bearing the brunt of the laws are supportive of them, including about three-quarters of seniors and those with household incomes under $50,000 and two-thirds of non-whites.

- Michael Brandon and Jon Cohen

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Poll: concerns about voter fraud spur broad support for Voter ID laws

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Almost three-quarters of all Americans support the idea that people should have to show photo identification to vote, even though they are nearly as concerned about voter suppression as they are about fraud in presidential elections, according to a new Washington Post poll.

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States with voter-ID laws must implement them soundly.

In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld on a 6-to-3 vote the constitutionality of laws requiring voter ID at the polls. Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the left-of-center judges on the Court, wrote the opinion in a case involving Indiana's voter-ID law: He found that the Court could not "conclude that the statute imposes 'excessively burdensome requirements' on any class of voters."

But our Constitution decentralizes our election procedures over 13,000 counties and towns, and states themselves are in charge of writing voter-ID laws should they choose to do so. Some do it better than others.

Last Friday, Judge Bernard McGinley of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court found that his state's voter-ID law violated Pennsylvania's constitution because the manner in which it was implemented placed an unreasonable burden on voters. The law, passed in 2012, had been blocked from taking effect while the court case against it ground forward. McGinley's decision is likely to be appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Or the legislature could pass a new version of the law that would answer the judge's objections.

#ad#McGinley concluded that the law had been implemented in a sloppy, haphazard way and that the state had not done enough to help provide IDs to voters who lacked one. Opponents of voter-ID laws are cheering the Pennsylvania ruling as a harbinger of further rollback of such laws nationwide. But it's hardly that. "The relevance of this ruling to other voter ID challenges is somewhat limited," writes Rick Hasen, a law professor specializing in election law at the University of California at Irvine. "The findings on implementation are state specific and don't really carry over to other states."

In addition, the judge found that Pennsylvania's law was not motivated by any effort to disenfranchise minorities or Democratic voters - despite comments from a couple of GOP state legislators predicting that the law, if it stood, would reduce voter fraud in the overwhelmingly Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia.

What won't be helpful in the defense of voter-ID laws in other states was Judge McGinley's finding that the state offered no evidence to support its claim that the law was needed to block voter fraud. That decision by attorneys from the office of Kathleen Kane, the state's Democratic attorney general, badly undercuts supporters of the law.

It's not as if there aren't clues that voter fraud is a problem. In 2012, Philadelphia city commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, issued a 27-page report on irregularities he found in a sample of city precincts during that year's primary. The report, which looked at only 1 percent of the city's districts, found cases of double voting, voter impersonation, and voting by non-citizens, as well as 23 people who were not registered to vote but nonetheless voted. Schmidt also found reports of people who were counted as voting in the wrong party's primary. "We identified hundreds of cases of voting irregularities [in select precincts] that warrant further investigation," he concluded.

But his report was largely ignored by city officials, who operate in an environment that former Democratic governor Ed Rendell (and former Philadelphia mayor) admitted to me was "a yeasty system where the rule of law isn't always followed." Indeed, the city has long been a fount of corruption. This was also true when Republicans ran a machine that dominated the city for 80 years, until the 1950s; during that period, not a single Democrat was elected mayor, in part because of Republican-led voter fraud. All that changed after Democrats seized control of the levers of city power and bent them to their will.

Longtime observers of Philadelphia are quite candid about what goes on there. The late Arlen Specter, who served Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate as both a Republican and a Democrat, openly scoffed at liberal claims that there was no voter fraud. "They don't see what they don't want to see," he told me in 2011. "I'm from Philadelphia. It's been a way of life here." Even after he became a Democrat, he stood by his 2007 GOP vote in favor of requiring photo IDs in all federal elections.

One reason for this is that Specter may once have been a victim of voter fraud himself. In 1967, he ran for mayor as a reform Republican against a Democratic machine that, Specter said, was "highly suspect if not demonstrably corrupt." Specter lost by 10,000 votes out of more than three-quarters of a million cast, and he strongly suspected that voter fraud played a big role in his loss.

Chris Matthews, the left-wing MSNBC host who hails from Pennsylvania, agrees that voter fraud is a Philly tradition. On Hardball he explained a common scheme there: Someone calls to enquire whether you voted or are going to vote, and "then all of a sudden, somebody does come and vote for you." Matthews says it's an old strategy in big-city politics: "I know all about it in North Philly - it's what went on, and I believe it still goes on."

Having said that, the same government entities that historically have failed to adequately address voter fraud also apparently botched the implementation of the state's voter-ID law. Judge McGinley found that the that state deployed too few mobile units to issue voter IDs and that wait times at DMV offices for voter IDs were often long. The state also spent too little money on educating voters about the new law and often issued vague implementation regulations on the fly.

#page#Any state looking to implement a sound voter-ID law must address these problems. Rhode Island secretary of state Ralph Mollis, a Democrat, convinced his state's left-leaning legislature to pass a photo-ID bill in 2011 to address problems of voter fraud in Providence and other cities. The law included extensive outreach efforts, with Mollis's office going to senior centers, homeless shelters, and community centers to process free IDs. The law has been implemented smoothly, Mollis says, and he views it as a national model.

Indeed, in 2005, a bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James Baker, issued 87 recommendations on how to clean up our system. One of its most important, support for national voter ID, was based on the commission's finding that "the electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters." Eighteen of the 21 commission members called for voters to show photo ID at the polls and for more security for absentee ballots.

Robert Pastor, the former executive director of the Carter-Baker commission (he also set up the Carter Center's election-monitoring programs), says he is disappointed that so few of the commission's recommendations have been implemented at the state or national level. In 2012, after a trip to Mexico, he compared that country's electoral system unfavorably with ours: "The Mexican electoral system is much fairer, professional, independent, and nonpartisan than the U.S. system." Every voter gets a biometric photo-ID card; the registration list is audited regularly; and the photos of the voters are on the list in each polling site.

#ad#Sadly, Pastor died this month, and his commonsense, bipartisan approach to making our election laws better will be missed. We need voter-ID laws to protect ballot integrity, and we also have to provide adequate resources to make sure voters have an ID. Such efforts should be in everyone's interests. Andrew Young, President Carter's U.N. ambassador, noted that, in an era when people have to show ID to travel, marry, or cash a check "requiring ID can help poor people who otherwise might be even more marginalized by not having one."

When Pennsylvania's voter-ID law is either appealed or rewritten, let's hope that the state does a better job debunking the inflated estimates that hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians lacked an ID.

The state should also emphasize that even when voters show up at the polling place without an ID, they can vote on a provisional ballot. The state will count that ballot if the voter mails, faxes, or e-mails a copy of acceptable ID within six days of the election. If a person lacks the money to obtain the background documents necessary to acquire a voter ID, he can sign an affidavit attesting to that fact, after which his vote will be counted without further questions.

Pennsylvania officials should also explain that requiring voter IDs does more than keep fraudsters away from polling places. It also deters voting under false registrations and voting by illegal aliens and people registered in more than one state. U.S. Justice Department investigations in the past have shown that these types of fraud do take place in Pennsylvania.

As for allegations that there is scant evidence that people commit voter fraud at polling places, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals addressed these when it upheld Indiana's voter-ID law:

There is voter fraud, specifically the form of voting fraud in which a person shows up at the polls claiming to be someone else - someone who has left the district, or died, too recently to have been removed from the list of registered voters, or someone who has not voted yet on election day. Without requiring a photo ID, there is little if any chance of preventing this kind of fraud because busy poll workers are unlikely to scrutinize signatures carefully and argue with people who deny having forged someone else's signature. . . . The absence of prosecutions is explained by the endemic underenforcement of minor criminal laws (minor as they appear to the public and prosecutors, at all events) and by the extreme difficulty of apprehending a voter impersonator.

New York City's watchdog Department of Investigations proved how easy it is commit in-person fraud last month when it issued a reporting detailing how its undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places and claimed to be individuals who had in fact died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote (they voted only for nonexistent write-in candidates). The city's Board of Elections, rather than examine its own sloppy procedures, responded by demanding that the investigators be prosecuted.

Pennsylvania's voter-ID law is in need of a tune-up, especially when it comes to outreach on free IDs. But the basic case for such laws hasn't been undermined by the decision of the Pennsylvania court. The vast majority of voters agree with the U.S. Supreme Court that properly drafted voter-ID laws are not overly burdensome. A 2012 Washington Post poll found that nearly two-thirds of African Americans and Hispanics back the requirement for photo IDs. And for good reason. Where strict voter-ID laws have been in operation for years, in states such as Indiana and Georgia, they have worked smoothly and the turnout of minority voters has in fact increased. Indeed, the Census Bureau has found that the rate of voter turnout for blacks exceeded that of whites for the first time in the 2012 election.

"When the day is done, my job is to maintain the integrity of elections," Mollis says in explaining his support for voter-ID in Rhode Island as well as in other states. "Even if a state doesn't have an immediate problem with fraud, doesn't it make sense to take sensible precautions rather than wait for someone to abuse the system, and then it's too late?"

- John Fund is a national-affairs columnist for National Review Online . Along with Hans von Spakovsky, he is the author of Who's Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.

John Fund - John Fund isNational Review's national-affairs reporter. @JohnFund

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Winning the Fight for Voter-ID | National Review

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In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld on a 6-to-3 vote the constitutionality of laws requiring voter ID at the polls. Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the left-of-center judges on the Court, wrote the opinion in a case involving Indiana's ...

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This post is being kept up-to-date. It was first published on July 23, 2012.
Voter ID laws are a contentious issue in the 2016 presidential election cycle. Many of the statutes will have their first test at the polls this year. Supporters say the laws - which 36 states have now enacted in some form - are needed to combat voter fraud, while critics see them as a tactic to disenfranchise voters.

We've taken a step back to look at the facts behind the laws and break down the issues at the heart of the debate.
So what are these laws?
They are measures intended to ensure that a registered voter is who he says he is and not an impersonator trying to cast a ballot in someone else's name. The laws, most of which have been passed or strengthened in the last five years, require that registered voters show ID before they're allowed to vote. Exactly what they need to show varies. Some states require a government-issued photo, while in others a current utility bill or bank statement is sufficient.
As a registered voter, I thought I always had to supply some form of ID during an election.
Not quite. Per federal law, first-time voters who registered by mail must present a photo ID or copy of a current bill or bank statement. Some states generally advise voters bring some form of photo ID. But prior to the 2006 election, no state ever required a voter to produce a government-issued photo ID as a condition to voting. Indiana in 2006 became the first state to enact a strict photo ID law, a law that was upheld two years later by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Why are these voter ID laws so strongly opposed?
Voting law opponents contend these laws disproportionately affect elderly, minority and low-income groups that tend to vote Democratic. Obtaining photo ID can be costly and burdensome. While many states with strict laws offer a free state ID for people without any other way to vote, these IDs require documents like a birth certificate that can cost up to $25 in some places. According to a study from NYU's Brennan Center, 11 percent of voting-age citizens lack necessary photo ID while many people in rural areas have trouble accessing ID offices.

A lawsuit filed against Alabama in early December 2015 cites the example of a high schooler who can't vote because she lacks a driver's license. According to the suit, she needs to get a state issued voter ID at the DMV, but the one nearest to her is only open one day per month and there's no public transportation to another DMV 40 miles away roundtrip.

During closing arguments in a 2012 case over Texas's voter ID law, a lawyer for the state brushed aside geographical obstacles as the "reality to life of choosing to live in that part of Texas."

Former Attorney General Eric Holder and others have compared the laws to a poll tax, in which Southern states during the Jim Crow era imposed voting fees, which discouraged blacks, and even some poor whites - until the passage of grandfather clauses - from voting.

Given the sometimes costly steps required to obtain needed documents today, legal scholars argue that photo ID laws create a new "financial barrier to the ballot box."
Just how well-founded are fears of voter fraud?
There have been only a small number of fraud cases resulting in a conviction. A New York Times analysis from 2007 identified 120 cases filed by the Justice Department over five years. These cases, many of which stemmed from mistakenly filled registration forms or misunderstanding over voter eligibility, resulted in 86 convictions.

There are "very few documented cases," said UC-Irvine professor and election law specialist Rick Hasen. "When you do see election fraud, it invariably involves election officials taking steps to change election results or it involves absentee ballots which voter ID laws can't prevent," he said.

An analysis by News21, a national investigative reporting project, identified 10 voter impersonation cases out of 2,068 alleged election fraud cases since 2000 - or one out of every 15 million prospective voters.

One of the most vocal supporters of strict voter ID laws, then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (now the state's governor), told the Houston Chronicle in July 2012 that his office has prosecuted about 50 cases of voter fraud in recent years. "I know for a fact that voter fraud is real, that it must be stopped, and that voter id is one way to prevent cheating at the ballot box and ensure integrity in the electoral system," he told the paper. Abbott's office did not respond to ProPublica's request for comment.
How many voters might be turned away or dissuaded by the laws, and could they really affect the election?
It's not clear.

According to the Brennan Center, about 11 percent of U.S. citizens, or roughly 21 million citizens, don't have government-issued photo ID. This figure doesn't represent all voters likely to vote, just those eligible to vote.

A 2012 analysis by Reuters and research firm Ipsos of data culled from 20,000 voter interviews found that those lacking proper ID were less likely to vote anyway, "regardless of state law changes."

Among those who said they were "certain to vote," only 1 percent said they did not have proper ID while another 1 percent said they were uncertain whether they had the proper ID. The analysis also found that those who lack valid photo ID tended to be young people, those without college educations, Hispanics and the poor.

Much of the academic literature finds that voter ID laws have an outsize effect on minorities: A working paper from researchers at the University of California, San Diego found that states with a strict photo ID law saw a significant decrease in turnout among minority and immigrant voters and an increase in the participation gap between white and nonwhite voters.

Exact state figures on how many people lack acceptable IDs can be hard to nail down. Before Pennsylvania's voter ID law was struck down, a 2012 analysis of state records by the Philadelphia Inquirer found that nearly 760,000 registered voters , or 9.2 percent of the state's 8.2 million voter base, don't own state-issued ID cards. State officials, on the other hand, placed the number between 80,000 and 90,000.

In a 2012 trial over Wisconsin's voter ID law, the plaintiff estimated that about 300,000 voters didn't have ID and attempted to analyze the demographic breakdown. An expert for thedefense put the number between 100,000 and 300,000 and called the demographics an "open question."

As for the potential effect on the election, one analysis by Nate Silver at the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog estimates they could decrease voter turnout anywhere between 0.8 and 2.4 percent. It doesn't sound like a very wide margin, but it all depends on the electoral landscape.

"We don't know exactly how much these news laws will affect turnout or skew turnout in favor of Republicans," said Hasen, author of The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown. "But there's no question that in a very close election, they could be enough to make a difference in the outcome."
When did voter ID laws get passed - and which states have the strictest ones?
The first such law was passed as early as 2003, but momentum has picked up in recent years. In 2011 alone, legislators in 34 states introduced bills requiring voters show photo ID - 14 of those states already had existing voter ID laws, but lawmakers sought to toughen statutes, mainly to require proof of photo identification.

The National Conference of State Legislatures has a helpful breakdown of states' voter ID laws and how they vary.

Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas, Mississippi, North Dakota, Virginia, Wisconsin and Texas have the toughest versions. These states won't allow voters to cast a regular ballot without first showing valid photo ID. Other states with photo ID laws offer some more flexibility by providing voters with several alternatives.
What happens if a voter can't show valid photo ID in these states?
These voters are entitled to a provisional ballot. To ensure their votes count, however, they must produce the mandatory ID within a certain time frame and affirm in person or writing they are the same individual who filled out a temporary ballot on Election Day. The time limits vary: They range anywhere from up to three days after the election (Georgia) to noon the Monday after the election (Indiana).

Are there any exceptions to the photo ID requirement?

Yes: Indigency or religious objections to being photographed. In Indiana, voters will be given a provisional ballot and must sign an affidavit for their exemption by a certain date. Texas grants an exception to voters who don't have an ID because of a recent natural disaster. For a more specific breakdown of all exceptions, see this list.
Voter ID laws were a big story in 2012. Why are we still talking about them?
A few reasons. While a majority of the voter ID laws were passed before the 2012 election, not all of them went into effect immediately. Wisconsin's voter ID law, passed in 2011, was only in effect for a low-turnout primary in a few municipalities before getting tied up in court and will have its first major test in 2016. States such as Virginia, Texas, and North Carolina passed voter ID laws after 2012 that haven't yet been tested in a high-turnout presidential election (Virginia and Texas' 2013 laws were in effect for the states' 2014 midterm elections, but North Carolina's voter ID law hasn't yet been in effect for a federal election).

This election cycle is also the first presidential election without Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act in effect. In 2013, it was struck down in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder. States previously required to get preclearance from the Justice Department to change voting laws under a formula laid out in Section 4(b) no longer have to. This means there's a whole spate of new voting laws in effect. Texas, for example, was initially blocked from implementing its voter ID law until it received preclearance. But the day of the Shelby ruling, the state announced that the law would take effect.

It also means that it's harder to challenge laws. The Justice Department can still challenge laws for discriminatory voting practices under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. But the plaintiff carries the burden of proof under Section 2 challenges, making them harder to win.

"This is the first presidential election in more than 50 years of the Voting Rights Act that the department's ability to enforce the act has been so severely cut back," Vanita Gupta, the head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, told The Washington Post the week before Super Tuesday.

Legal challenges to the laws - from groups like the NAACP, League of Women Voters, and Democratic lawyers - are still winding their way through the legal system. In many states, these cases aren't the first time the laws have been challenged.
What are the current challenges to the laws?
Some voter ID laws have been blocked by the courts. A Pennsylvania judge struck down the state's voter ID law in 2014, and the then-governor declined to appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court.

Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who also serves as general counsel for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, brought suit against voter ID laws in Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio and North Carolina (Elias isn't acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign). In Virginia, Elias is arguing that the law is an undue burden on poor and minority voters who are unlikely to have an ID and are more likely to vote Democrat.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued Alabama over its voter ID law in early December, alleging it discriminated against African Americans. A judge declined to issue a preliminary injunction on Feb. 18, but hasn't yet ruled on the suit.

Texas' voter ID law is in a legal tangle: in August 2015, a federal appeals panel found that the law discriminated against minorities, but it disagreed with the lower court's finding that the law was the equivalent of a poll tax and intentionally discriminatory. The appellate court sent the law back to the lower court for review. In March 2016, the federal appeals court decided to hear a challenge to the law en banc - the whole court, not just the panel, will hear the case. Meanwhile, the law remains in effect.
Are there other voter ID laws in effect that ask for but don't necessarily require photo ID?
Yes. In these so-called "non-strict photo ID states" - Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Idaho, South Dakota and Hawaii - individuals are requested to show photo ID but can still vote if they don't have one. Instead, they may be asked to sign affidavits affirming their identity or provide a signature that will be compared with those in registration records.
Why has there been such a recent surge in voter ID legislation around the country?
This report by NYU's Brennan Center for Justice cites primarily big Republican gains in the 2010 midterms which turned voter ID laws into a "major legislative priority." Aside from Rhode Island, all voter ID legislation has been introduced by Republican-majority legislatures.

News21 also has this report on the close affiliation between the bills' sponsors and the conservative nonprofit group, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Republican figures have championed such laws. In a now-infamous remark, Mike Turzai, majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, praised the state's legislative accomplishments - including passing a voter ID law - at a 2012 Republican State Committee meeting.

"Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done," he said.

A spokesman for Turzai, Steve Miskin, told ProPublica that Turzai was "mischaracterized" by the press. "For the first time in many years, you're going to have a relatively level playing field in the presidential elections" as the result of these new laws," Miskin said.

Clarification Sept. 25, 2012: This post has been clarified to reflect details about who was discouraged from voting under a poll tax.

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Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know About Voter ID Laws - ProPublica

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This post is being kept up-to-date. It was first published on July 23, 2012. Voter ID laws are a contentious issue in the 2016 presidential election cycle. Many of the statutes will have their first test at the polls this year.

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VOTING RIGHTS 2016: WHAT'S AT STAKEVoting rights are under attack nationwide as states pass voter suppression laws. These laws lead to significant burdens for eligible voters trying to exercise their most fundamental constitutional right. Since 2008, states across the country have passed measures to make it harder for Americans-particularly black people, the elderly, students, and people with disabilities-to exercise their fundamental right to cast a ballot.

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North Carolina State Board of Elections Website