Argument Essay

The article “The battle over Voter IDs” by Alessandra Potenza introduces a very controversial topic in the US; whether or not voters should be forced to show their ID. Many people, particularly republicans, believe that it should be a law because it could prevent a lot of voter fraud. However, many think that this is unfair because it limits the amount of people who can vote. Voters should not be required to show their IDs because it could prevent people from voting.

One reason why voters should not be required to show their ID is because it discourages those who don’t have IDs to vote. There are a lot of people in America, 21 million people, who don’t have an ID but are eligible to vote. Most of these people are either black, elderly, or hispanic. This means that because of this law, 21 million people now aren’t allowed to vote. This requirement also breaks the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because this act banned racial discrimination in voting. “Some laws see the new voter ID laws as the late effort to make it harder for certain groups to vote. This is favoring a certain kind of people.”  This is considered racism or “racial discrimination,” something that was banned in voting over 45 years ago. It’s unfair to so many who can no longer express their opinion on how to make their own country a better place simply because they don’t have an ID.

Secondly, this new law violates the 26th Amendment . This amendment states that “The right to vote ‘shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on the account of age.’” This Amendment is broken because many students now cannot vote because they only have student IDs. Student IDs are not considered a valid from of identification in this law. They won’t be able to use these IDs so they must find another way of identification which can be pretty time consuming.  To make their problems worse, those college students who can find an alternative ID card, also aren’t allowed to vote in their collage state if they didn’t change their home address to their college address. This can be a problem because many students forget to change their address. “‘[This law is] a direct attack on students and their voting,’” says Jocelyn Hunt, a senior. Students should have just as good as an opportunity to vote as everyone else.

Many people believe that “these rules are necessary to prevent voter fraud.” They believe that if everyone is required to show an ID, there will be less voter fraud. However, “Democrats argue that voter fraud-particularly voter impersonation, which is what requiring IDs arms to prevent- is rare.” The likelihood of someone trying to pretend to be someone else while voting has proven to be very rare. So rare, that there is clearly another purpose of this law. Some believe that because most of the people who don’t have IDs are democrats, the goal for republicans is to try and unbalance the votes so they can get more votes. This claim would probably need a lot more evidence to back itself up but it is definitely a possibility.

Voting is something that a lot of people care about. Making important decisions independently is imperative to a lot of people. If the government takes this away from certain people who simply don’t have an ID, they could get them very mad. It could force them to stand up for themselves and fight for what is right.