Of course this is the exact opposite of what we were told would happen. Far from voter turnout going up, voter ID laws were supposed to suppress the turnout of poor people and minorities.
Here in GA we had voter ID laws for the last couple of years, but if you'd forgotten your ID all you had to do was sign a paper and swear an oath that you were who you said you were. The only time that was an issue in our precinct was when a couple of voters who typically stop by to vote when they're out jogging hadn't brought their IDs with them.
Now the ID is mandatory and it's still not an issue.
In other precincts they would be more likely to have issues with voter ID, but the state of GA has done a very good job of making sure people are not disenfranchised because of the requirement.
There are still ways to suppress voter turnout if someone wants to. There's the classic of sending few machines to big precincts or sending the machines that are unreliable there. There's the method of placing the polls farther away from voters that are less likely to have transportation.
There are a lot of tried and true methods that are quite independent of whatever apparatus is used to record votes.
The biggest problem in our precinct is finding names of some Asians on our list, because the people doing registration at the main office don't always get the Asian custom of family name first, individual name last.
But we're used to it, so we've managed to find everyone in our registration list so far. Sometimes it just takes a moment longer.
