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The bottom line is this: voter ID is not controversial in this country,” Harry Enten, the chief data analyst for CNN, recently reported. Nor is it controversial in virtually any other country in the world. Yet despite massive support among both Democrats (71%) and Republicans (95%), only one Democratic member of the House and one in the Senate are supporting the SAVE Act. Unless seven more of the 47 Senate Democrats step forward, their filibuster will kill the bill.

Democrats argue that requiring free voter photo IDs – even when the ID itself costs nothing – harms eligible voters by creating practical barriers to casting a ballot. They contend that blacks would be especially hard hit. Interestingly, every country in Africa requires government-issued identification to vote.

They also argue that such requirements would disenfranchise Hispanic voters. Yet Mexico, all twelve South American countries, and Spain require government-issued photo IDs to vote.

All of these countries have lower per-capita incomes than the United States. If citizens in those nations can obtain the necessary identification to vote, why would American Hispanics and blacks be unable to do the same?

While 83% of American adults support requiring government-issued photo identification to vote, support is also strong among the very groups Democrats claim would be harmed: 82% of Hispanics and 76% of black Americans favor the requirement. Those figures suggest that most black and Hispanic Americans do not view obtaining a photo ID as the obstacle Democrats describe. Ten U.S. states have similarly strong photo ID requirements.

Democrats claim that women are disproportionately disenfranchised by voter IDs, but women are also strongly supportive of IDs and have exactly the same level of support as men.

Democrats argue that voter ID requirements disproportionately disenfranchise people with the least education and lowest incomes. Yet, ironically, survey results show that voters who did not graduate from high school were 27 percentage points more likely to support photo voter ID laws than those who attended graduate school. Similarly, individuals earning less than $30,000 per year were seven percentage points more likely to support photo ID requirements than those earning over $200,000 annually. The well-educated and higher-income individuals thus express more concern about the impact of ID laws on the less educated and lower-income groups than those groups express themselves.

But it isn’t just South American countries and all of Africa that require voter IDs to vote. Both of our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, require them, with Mexico also requiring a thumbprint. All 47 European countries, except parts of the United Kingdom, require a government-issued photo ID .

After widespread vote fraud, Mexico enacted major voting reforms in 1991. The government mandated voter photo IDs with biometric information, banned absentee ballots, and required in-person voter registration. Even though these changes made registration more difficult and eliminated absentee voting, turnout increased after the reforms took effect. In the three presidential elections following the 1991 changes, an average of 68% of eligible citizens voted, compared with 59% in the three elections before the reforms. As confidence in the electoral process grew, more citizens chose to participate.

Many countries in Europe and beyond have learned the hard way that fraud can result from looser voting regimes – and they have instituted stricter voting measures in direct response to it.

In Northern Ireland, where a bitter sectarian conflict fuels hardball electoral tactics, parties on all sides have engaged in what observers describe as “widespread and systemic“ voter fraud. Both Conservative and Labour governments enacted reforms to curb it. In 1985, under the conservative Margaret Thatcher, the U.K. began requiring voters to show identification before receiving a ballot, but that measure did not solve the problem. In 1998, a Select Committee on Northern Ireland reported that people could “easily forge” medical cards – accepted as ID under the 1985 law – or obtain them fraudulently, enabling non-existent individuals to cast votes.

By 2002, the Labour government strengthened voter identification cards to make them far harder to forge and used the more secure IDs, along with additional rules, to stop people from registering multiple times. These anti-fraud measures immediately reduced total registrations by 11%, suggesting to Labour how extensive earlier fraud had been.

A study of vote fraud in Northern Ireland before the 2002 reforms interviewed Brendan Hughes, the former IRA Belfast commander. Hughes described how he operated a fleet of taxis to transport fraudulent voters from one polling station to another. He said they dressed volunteers in wigs, different clothes, and glasses, and noted that this practice continued for decades. He added that they typically used young women for voter impersonation because officials were more likely to let them vote if any doubt arose.

A 2002 survey of Northern Ireland by the U.K. Electoral Commission, conducted after the rules passed but before they went into effect, found that by a 64% to 10% margin, voters thought that vote “fraud in some areas is enough to change the election results.”

“I support the SAVE America Act because I believe in a fundamental principle: American citizens should decide American elections,” Henry Cuellar, the one House Democrat voting for the bill, noted. “That principle strengthens our democracy and protects the value of every vote.” There are currently seven states that require proof of citizenship just as required in the SAVE Act (e.g., birth certificate, passport, tribal documents, naturalization papers). Sen. John Fetterman, the only Democrat in the Senate to speak out favorably for the bill, said requiring voters to show identification is not “unreasonable.”

But Democrats follow the line of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who claims “The SAVE Act would impose Jim Crow style restrictions on voting.”

If banning voter IDs is a hallmark of democracy, Democrats will need to start castigating virtually all the other countries in the world as anti-democratic nations.

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