Most of these states seemed to be in a rush to enact voter ID laws before the 2012 election in which the democratic candidate, Barack Obama, the first person of color to hold office as president, could possibly be re-elected. Considering that the states introducing these laws (except one) have all been Republican-dominated, combined with the fact that the actual occurrence of voter fraud in the United States is almost non-existent, there has been a question of the real intention of enacting such legislature.
The ideas of those who question the legitimacy of voter ID laws are not a mere conspiracy theory, but instead are actually supported by history. The United States has a history of restricting the rights of certain groups to vote. Our nation's Constitution specified how the president was to be elected, but left who was allowed to vote up to the states. For many years, voting rights were reserved only for white males who owned land. The struggle for the right to vote was a strenuous one for minorities, women, immigrants, and even low-income whites. Even after the passage of the 15th amendment in 1870, which stated that the right to vote could not "be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude," many states (mostly in the south) found ways to restrict these rights. The tactics used included literacy tests, grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and just plain scaring blacks and other groups out of showing up to the polls, usually with violence. Through the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, most of these practices were diminished, and in 1962 Congress passed the 24th Amendment, which made it illegal for a state or the federal government to charge any fee for casting a ballot in a federal election. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped to solidify the voting rights of all Americans, and gave the Department of Justice the power to sue states that limited the voting rights of minorities.
