Voter ID laws are a non-issue. In the long run they might be a good thing. A photo ID is needed for almost everything and the law may prompt individuals who don't have an ID to get one. Democrats should look at photo IDs the same way they look at phones. As they argue you need a phone to get a job and do all sorts of things. In turn you need a photo ID.
"But some implied that Democratic-leaning voting groups, especially African-Americans and Hispanics, were more likely to be affected. Others found that educational attainment was the key variable in predicting whom these laws might disenfranchise, with race being of secondary importance. If that’s true, some white voters without college degrees could also be affected, and they tend to vote Republican."
"On the surface, these studies seem to disagree with one another about whether or not there is any effect on turnout from harsher voter identification laws. But if you read them in more detail, you’ll find that much of the disagreement is semantic rather than substantive.
There is something of a consensus in the literature, in fact, about the rough magnitude of the effects. The stricter laws, like those that require photo identification, seem to decrease turnout by about 2 percent as a share of the registered voter population.
Whether this effect is deemed to be “statistically significant” or not varies from study to study. It depends on what particular type of statistical test the researcher has applied, and how much data he or she is looking at.
Statistical significance, however, is a funny concept. It has mostly to do with the volume of data that you have, and the sampling error that this introduces. Effects that may be of little practical significance can be statistically significant if you have tons and tons of data. Conversely, findings that have some substantive, real-world impact may not be deemed statistically significant, if the data is sparse or noisy."
“Many people who do not have identification are not registered to vote – or if they are registered, they are unlikely to turn out.”
"One last thing to consider: although I do think these laws will have some detrimental effect on Democratic turnout, it is unlikely to be as large as some Democrats fear or as some news media reports imply — and they can also serve as a rallying point for the party bases. So although the direct effects of these laws are likely negative for Democrats, it wouldn’t take that much in terms of increased base voter engagement — and increased voter conscientiousness about their registration status — to mitigate them."
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/measuring-the-effects-of-voter-identification-laws/?_r=0
