In the history of the United States, voting has made a very big impact ever since the beginning. But nowadays, government officials are thinking about revising the voting system. This would be due to the fact that in the past decade, there has been instances of people saying they are someone they aren’t, non-citizen voting, people voting twice, and more. The idea to revise the process would be to have people show their ID to confirm their identity. But others are reasoning that it is not necessary. So in reality, there are two sides to this problem: those who think there should be a voter ID law in place and those that believe it isn’t necessary. There are both pros and cons to adding a voter ID law to any states voting procedure. The arguments would be concerning voter fraud, voter turnout, keeping the system safe, and how much work it really is to obtain an ID. These are all very controversial because each state has their own beliefs about the citizens and what the requirements to vote should be.
On the pro side of the viewpoints, it is viewed as though a voter ID requirement would prevent voter fraud from happening. This is because they think that voter fraud is a much bigger problem than most people would think. Voter fraud consists of when poll workers, convicts, and people sneak past the officials and vote when they are not supposed to or vote multiple times. Now this is not a case that occurs frequently, but when it does there are extreme punishments. For example, the penalty for voter fraud is usually a fine ranging from $300 to $500, a one or two year sentence in prison, and even disfranchisement (cga.gov). Disfranchisement means that a person is no longer able to vote in any election for the rest of his/ her life. There were 120 cases of voter fraud filed by the Justice Department between 2002-2007.
That resulted in 86 convictions of the people who were filed against. But sometimes, it might not always be the voter that is committing fraud. This is due to the fact that there are cases in which the poll workers are submitting extra ballots or registered other people to vote multiple times. Another example of voter fraud would be when felons cast a ballot even though they are still on probation. Some people believe that having voter ID laws would prevent all of these problems concerning voter fraud. On the other hand, having a voter ID requirement would not prevent voter fraud from happening. The people who think that are on the negative side of the argument and do not think that voter ID should even be in place.
