a) Republicans did the math and figured out that a lot of people who vote Democrat didn't have IDs. Old black people, in particular, were not likely to have IDs. Republicans also did stuff like accept fishing and hunting licenses for voting, but not university ID. None of this is a secret. A think-tank called ALEC came up with it. In-person voter fraud, the only kind of election rigging that voter ID laws prevent, is next to impossible in the US system and basically never occurs on more than a one-off basis.

b) A lot of those people who didn't have IDs have either gotten IDs or died off by now, so the Republican advantage of voter ID laws has faded.

c) Given (b), Republicans have moved on to other tactics like voter purges, shutting down registration offices and polling stations to create long lines in urban districts, gerrymandering, and limiting early voting and mail in voting. One of their favorite tactics is limiting early-voting mailboxes to one per precinct, whether that precinct has 1,000 voters or 1,000,000. You can guess which way the crowded urban precincts tend to vote.

The whole idea is just to put their thumb on the scale enough to discourage some small % of voters in the swing states that determine our president every four years. If you live in California, no one cares how you vote for President.

As a French I used to think too, "what's the big deal", "it has never been an issue here". But that's because we are used to it and getting an ID is easy and almost automatic. Whereas in a country like the US, it means missing several days of work, driving potentially hundreds of kilometers, and their geographic segregation means it's easy to make getting an ID harder for black people than for whites.

As a European I also find insane elections are held on workdays (in France it is always on Sundays), that you may have to wait in line for hours to vote, that voting stations may be hours from where you live, etc.

That's because you live someplace where the things described in the various links in this comment [1] do not happen or happen way less than they do in the US.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42116609

I don't, but we have a functioning citizen registration system; every voting eligible citizen gets sent a voting card when elections come up. That can only work if you're registered and have a known address. "Illegal aliens" don't have that, so they can't vote. Foreign nationals that are registered / stay here legally also don't get voting rights so they simply don't get the voting card mailed to them.

But also because of that registration, getting a kind of ID involves making an appointment at the county house, filling in a form and handing over a recent portrait photo. It's a bit of a hassle but nothing extreme.

You've fallen victim to GOP propaganda. They use 'Voter ID' as a reasonable sounding shorthand for a lot of policies that just make it harder to vote. The other responders highlighted many of them.

It's a different culture, one which is not used to have and use a national ID, which is completely common in the EU (with the exception of Ireland perhaps?)

If it makes you feel any better the UK Conservatives tried this under the "we have to stop voting fraud" excuse. Turns out it backfired because the oldies couldn't figure out the new requirements leading to this scandalous quote from pantomime villain Jacob Reese-Mogg:

> Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding that their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections.

> We found the people who didn't have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.