Places where voter ID policies are unproblematic have ubiquitous national ID cards possessed by every citizen. The United States famously does not have a national ID card, and instead uses a patchwork of state level IDs which require different levels of effort and cost to acquire. Many citizens do not have a legal ID at all, and some citizens even lack the paperwork necessary to acquire them under current law. If every voter had an ID, or if the government went to great lengths to ensure that every citizen could get one, voter ID laws wouldn't be problem. But as it stands voter ID laws prevent hundreds of thousands of citizens from voting, and those citizens are disproportionately poor and racial minorities, meaning that voter ID requirements have deeply distortionary effects on the composition of the voting electorate.