Voter ID Laws Did Not Significantly Suppress Minority Turnout in 2024

Despite some of the heated rhetoric around the issue, laws mandating photo identification at the polling booth do not seem to prevent Americans of all backgrounds from exercising their right to vote.

In recent years, voter ID laws have been a topic of heated controversy across the country. Proponents argue that they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, while critics contend that they will lead to discrimination against minority voters.

In the 2024 general election, however, black, Hispanic, and other minority voters came out in vast numbers despite the presence of voter ID laws in multiple states – leaving it dubious as to whether such laws significantly suppress voter turnout, if indeed they have any impact at all.

According to their detractors, voter ID laws implicitly target certain groups – including black and Hispanic voters – who are less likely to possess valid voter ID, and also more likely to support vote for Democratic candidates. Yet in the 2024 election, Republicans, and particularly President-Elect Donald Trump, performed surprisingly well among nonwhite voters.

In fact, Trump won a higher percentage of black and Latino voters than any Republican presidential candidate in a half century, with the shift being particularly pronounced among the men of both demographics. The same applies for young Americans, another group which critics of voter ID say are unfairly targeted by such laws. While Harris won narrowly among young voters, Trump’s performance in the 18-30 age demographic was significantly stronger than in 2016 or 2020.

Voter turnout overall remained extremely high in the 2024 election cycle. While down from the record 158 million votes cast in the outlier year of 2020, over 153 million Americans went to the polls in 2024. The ensuing Republican victory, writes Nicholas Riccardi at the Associated Press, “contradicts the belief in politics that Democrats, not Republicans, benefit from high-turnout elections.”

There is little direct evidence for the claim that voter ID laws suppress turnout on a level significant enough to sway the results of a national election. On the contrary, a 2019 study found that states with voter ID laws did not have decreased turnout, nor did such laws have a disparate impact by race. This held true even when researchers attempted to control for political mobilization in the face of voter ID laws.

The results of the 2019 study were replicated by researchers in 2023, who also found that such laws had little effect – except in the immediate aftermath of their passage, when they slightly helped the Democratic Party.

Sure enough, in the 2024 election, states with voter ID laws still saw high levels of turnout. Georgia, for instance, which requires a photo ID to vote, saw record black turnout during the early voting period. Additionally, Trump performed about equally well across all of the major swing states, which vary widely in their approach to voter ID.

As with many regulations concerning voting, voter ID laws vary dramatically across the country. Thirty-five states require voters to present some form of identification in order to vote, with 25 states specifically requiring photo ID. The remaining 15 states, including California, New York, and Illinois, do not require any form of identification at all.

Despite the controversy surrounding them among the commentariat class, polling data suggests that voter ID laws are overwhelmingly popular with the general public. A Pew Research survey from February 2024 found that 81% of Americans support requiring a government-issued photo identification in order to vote, including 60% of Democrats and 95% of Republicans.

Internationally, voter ID laws are quite common. Most other developed countries require some form of government-issued identification to vote, including 46 out of the 47 countries in Europe.