Jon Greenbaum [Voting Rights Project Director, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law]: "Since the 2004 election, one disturbing trend in election law has been the enactment of laws requiring voters to provide government-issued voter identification in order to cast ballot or documentation of citizenship in order to register. These laws, which have been enacted in Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, and Missouri, have the impact of disfranchising millions of voters who do not have the required identification and are not able take the time and pay the money to get the identification. In passing these laws, legislators have claimed that they are necessary to prevent voter fraud without any facts to support their claims. Information obtained through court cases has revealed that voter impersonation, the specific type of voter fraud prevented by requiring government-issued identification to vote, is not a problem in any of these states. Instead, politicians are using these laws as a device to maintain their own incumbencies by keeping certain types of voters — the elderly, minorities, the poor, and students — out of the political process.

Thankfully, several courts have struck down these laws. Most recently, on October 16, the Supreme Court of Missouri affirmed the trial court's ruling that Missouri's government-issued photo identification voting requirement violated the equal protection clause of the Missouri constitution in Weinschenk v. State of Missouri. The Supreme Court found that the identification provisions constitute "a heavy and substantial burden on Missourians' free exercise of their right to vote" because of the money and effort required to procure the necessary identification and the number of people who did not have the required identification (between 169,000 and 240,000). In assessing the government's justification, the Court noted that the preexisting identification requirements, which required voters to provide identification but not necessarily photo identification, had been sufficient to prevent voter impersonation, and so the law was not necessary to justify such a burden it exacts on Missouri voters. By carefully weighing through the evidence and faithfully applying the law, the Missouri Supreme Court saw the government-issued photo identification requirement for what it is: an unneeded modern day poll tax."