Voter ID Laws: Is It Really About Illegal Immigrants — Or Is Something Else Going On?

What the NCSL Map Actually Reveals

Pull up the NCSL’s voter ID law tracker at ncsl.org, and what you’ll see is a patchwork of 50 different state systems, each with its own rules, exceptions, and enforcement mechanisms. As of now, 35 states have some form of voter ID law. Of those, some require strict photo ID, while others accept a utility bill, a paycheck stub, or even a voter registration card with no photo at all.

Seven states have what NCSL classifies as “strict” photo ID requirements — meaning if you show up without qualifying ID, your ballot doesn’t count unless you take additional steps. Another 28 states have non-strict or non-photo ID requirements.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The states with the most aggressive voter ID pushes are frequently the same states where ballot harvesting — the practice of third parties collecting and submitting absentee or mail-in ballots on behalf of voters — is either legal, loosely regulated, or actively practiced by well-funded political organizations.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s a strategy.

Ballot Harvesting: The Real Battlefield

Ballot harvesting is the process by which a political operative, volunteer, or paid agent collects completed mail-in ballots from voters and submits them on their behalf. In some states, this is entirely legal with minimal oversight. In others, it’s restricted to family members or caregivers. In a handful of states, it’s an outright felony.

Unlike the largely hypothetical threat of an undocumented immigrant slipping into a polling place and somehow successfully casting a ballot without detection, ballot harvesting is documented, scaled, and industrialized. Both parties do it. Both parties deploy resources to run harvesting operations in high-density areas — nursing homes, college campuses, low-income neighborhoods.

The problem isn’t the concept of helping someone submit their ballot. The problem is the potential for coercion, selective submission, and outright fraud when there is no meaningful chain-of-custody requirement and no ID verification at the point of collection.

Think about it: if someone can hand a third-party operative their completed ballot with no ID verification, no witnessed signature requirement, and no assurance that ballot will actually be submitted — voter ID at the polling place is largely theater for that voter’s participation in the process. The corruption point has simply moved upstream.

This is where sophisticated election observers say the real vulnerability lies. Not at the voting booth, where poll workers and observers are present, but in the weeks-long, dispersed, largely unsupervised world of mail-in ballot collection.

So What Percentage of Votes Are Actually Ballot Harvested?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: nobody officially tracks it — and that absence of data is itself a story worth telling.

Unlike in-person voting, which generates clean, auditable records at polling places, mail-in ballot collection doesn’t require third-party collectors to register, report, or file any meaningful data in most states. There is no federal database. There is no national clearinghouse. In the majority of states where harvesting is legal, collected ballots are simply submitted and counted alongside all other mail-in ballots with no separate accounting for who delivered them.

What we do know paints a significant picture.

In the 2024 presidential election, roughly one-third of all voters cast their ballots by mail, according to Pew Research — that’s approximately 50 to 55 million ballots sent through the mail in a single election cycle. In presidential elections, total ballots cast typically run between 155 and 160 million. Mail-in voting now accounts for somewhere between 30% and 46% of total ballots, depending on the state and election year, and that share has been climbing steadily since 2020.

Now, of those mail-in ballots, what share passed through a third-party collector? Again, no official number. But here’s what the state-level data tells us.

California — the largest state by population and the one with the most permissive harvesting laws — returned roughly 9.8 million vote-by-mail ballots in the 2022 general election alone. In 2018, after California legalized unlimited third-party collection, election results in multiple congressional districts shifted dramatically in the weeks following Election Day as harvested ballots were processed. Orange County Republicans, who had held multiple House seats going into election night, lost every single one of them as late-arriving harvested ballots were counted.

The California GOP took notice. In 2022, they ran their own harvesting operation targeting 18,000 Republicans with outstanding mail ballots in a competitive Central Valley congressional race. The result: a documented 34% uptick in pre-Election Day votes cast. That is not a trivial number. That is a margin that wins and loses close elections.

Beyond California, the scale becomes harder to pin down precisely because the laws vary so dramatically. Thirty-one states and Washington D.C. currently permit ballot harvesting with some form of designation requirement. In most of those states, no limit exists on how many ballots a single collector can handle. In some, paid collection is explicitly permitted.

Conservative groups have alleged far larger numbers. The documentary “2000 Mules,” released in 2022, claimed that roughly 400,000 ballots were illegally harvested across five key swing states in the 2020 election by approximately 2,000 paid operatives. The methodology was widely disputed, including by former Attorney General Bill Barr, who reviewed the evidence and said it fell far short of proving the claims. Georgia election officials called the underlying analysis “wholly unsupported.”

So where does that leave us? The honest answer is: ballot harvesting almost certainly accounts for millions of ballots in any given national election, concentrated in states where it is legal and aggressively practiced. Whether that number is 3 million or 10 million or higher, nobody actually knows — because nobody is required to count.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. When you don’t track something, you can’t audit it. When you can’t audit it, you can’t detect abuse. And when you can’t detect abuse, you can’t prosecute it. The absence of data isn’t proof of innocence. In election security terms, it’s a gap in the chain of custody — and chains of custody exist precisely because good intentions aren’t enough.

California Doesn’t Matter Electorally — But Its Popular Vote Numbers Do

Here’s a point that almost never gets made, and it should.

The standard dismissal of California’s ballot harvesting operation goes something like this: “It doesn’t matter. California’s electoral votes go Democratic no matter what. It’s not a swing state. Move on.” And in the narrow context of the Electoral College, that’s technically true. No one is seriously disputing that California’s 54 electoral votes will land in the Democratic column in a presidential race.

But that framing completely ignores something that matters enormously in American political life: the national popular vote — and the mandate it confers.

When a president wins office, one of the first questions the press, the opposition, and the public asks is: by how much? Did they win narrowly, or did they win decisively? A candidate who wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote faces an immediate legitimacy narrative — one that their opponents will use relentlessly to undercut their authority to govern. We’ve seen this play out twice in the last 25 years, most acutely in 2000 and again in 2016. Conversely, a president who wins the Electoral College and runs up a commanding popular vote margin enters office with a far stronger claim to a governing mandate.

This is where California’s harvesting machine becomes politically consequential regardless of its electoral outcome.

California is the most populous state in the nation with approximately 39 million residents and roughly 22 million registered voters. In the 2020 presidential election, California alone generated over 17.5 million votes. In 2024, that number remained similarly massive. When a well-funded, legally unrestricted ballot harvesting operation systematically drives up turnout in a state that size — even by a few percentage points — the ripple effect on the national popular vote total is enormous.

Think about it in raw numbers. If aggressive harvesting operations in California generate even 500,000 additional votes that would not otherwise have been cast or submitted, that’s half a million votes added to the national popular vote tally. A million additional votes? That can be the difference between a president claiming a “historic mandate” and being forced to govern defensively against a narrative of narrow legitimacy.

And California is not alone. Illinois, New York, Massachusetts — other large, safely partisan states with permissive mail-in ballot laws — all potentially benefit from the same dynamic on their respective sides of the aisle. The same logic applies in reverse in large, safely red states with aggressive harvesting programs, though those operations are fewer and more recently established.

The point isn’t that the harvested votes are necessarily fraudulent. Many of them are perfectly legal ballots from real, eligible voters who simply had someone else drop off their envelope. The point is that a systematically organized, well-funded operation that inflates turnout in non-competitive states can meaningfully distort the national popular vote — which shapes the political narrative of every incoming administration, influences how aggressively they pursue their agenda, and affects how Congress responds to their priorities.

An incoming president who claims a 5 million vote popular vote margin governs differently — and is treated differently by allies and opponents alike — than one who claims a 500,000 vote margin. That gap can be manufactured, legally, through harvesting operations in states whose electoral outcomes were never in doubt. And nobody is counting those ballots separately to flag the distinction.

That’s not a hypothetical concern. That’s a structural feature of the current system — one that the voter ID debate, focused almost entirely on the polling place, does absolutely nothing to address.

In California, You Need a License for Everything — Except Collecting Ballots

This might be the most telling detail in the entire voter ID debate, and it deserves to be said plainly.

California is the most aggressively licensed state in America. To earn a living cutting hair, you need a cosmetology license. To sell real estate, you need a broker’s license. To work security at a shopping mall, you need a guard card. To notarize a document, you need a notary commission. To catch fish commercially, you need a fishing license. To install electrical wiring in someone’s home, you need a contractor’s license. California even requires a license to be a process server — the person who hands someone a legal document.

The state’s licensing apparatus is so expansive that it regulates occupations down to landscape architects, geologists, and, in some counties, florists. California’s Bureau of Security and Investigative Services alone oversees more than 40 different license categories. The underlying rationale is always the same: some activities carry enough risk to the public that the state has an interest in knowing who is doing them, vetting their backgrounds, and holding them accountable through a formal regulatory framework.

Now consider what California requires of someone who wants to walk through neighborhoods, knock on doors, collect hundreds of completed ballots from voters, and deliver those ballots to election officials — ballots that determine who runs the country.

The requirement is this: write your name, your relationship to the voter, and your signature on the envelope.

That’s it.

No registration. No licensing. No background check. No training. No limit on how many ballots a single person can collect. No requirement to report to any election authority before you begin. No government database tracking who is operating as a collector, in which neighborhoods, for which organizations, or on whose payroll. And here’s the detail that makes the whole framework almost surreal: even if the collector fails to write their name and relationship on the envelope, that is not — under California law — grounds for rejecting the ballot. The California Voter Foundation’s own president has acknowledged this, describing the name and signature requirement as “more like a contract between the voter and the collector” than an enforceable legal safeguard.

So to be clear: the person collecting your ballot has no accountability to the state whatsoever. They may be a paid campaign operative. They may have a criminal history. They may work for a foreign-funded nonprofit. They may be collecting ballots in exchange for gift cards or grocery deliveries in a transaction that skirts the technical definition of compensation. And there is no registry, no oversight body, no licensing board, and no pre-election vetting process in place to know any of that.

In a state that requires a background check and state-issued license to trim someone’s eyebrows, the people handling the physical ballots that determine national election outcomes operate in a regulatory vacuum that would make the Wild West look bureaucratic.

The irony isn’t just rhetorical. It points to a structural reality: California’s licensing regime exists to protect consumers from harm in low-stakes transactions. But when it comes to ballot collection — an activity with direct implications for democratic outcomes — the state has chosen a framework of minimal accountability and maximum access. Whether that reflects a genuine commitment to voter enfranchisement or a deliberate strategic choice about who benefits from the current system is a question worth asking out loud.

So why does the conversation stay focused on ID at the polls rather than harvesting operations?

Simple. Each party has something to protect.

Republicans have historically been better at turning out in-person Election Day voters. Their base — older, more rural, more likely to have reliable transportation and government-issued ID — is less disrupted by strict polling place ID requirements. Pushing the narrative of illegal immigrants “stealing elections” at the ballot box keeps attention on in-person voting, where they’re stronger.

Democrats have built powerful mail-in ballot and early voting infrastructure, particularly in urban areas. Ballot harvesting operations in high-density precincts — legal in states like California, Nevada, and others — have become a measurable turnout multiplier. Any serious regulatory crackdown on harvesting threatens that infrastructure.

So both sides have shaped the public debate to protect their tactical advantages, and the average American voter — the one who just wants fair elections — is left watching a fight about a problem that may be largely symbolic while the more structural issue gets minimal airtime.

When You Do the Math, Buying the Vote Is the Bargain of the Century

Let’s talk about money, because in politics, money is always where the real conversation lives.

The 2024 federal election cycle was the most expensive in American history — by a significant margin. According to OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign finance using Federal Election Commission data, the total cost of the 2024 federal election exceeded $16 billion. When you add state-level races, ballot measures, and party committees into the full picture, total election-related spending across the 2023–2024 cycle surpassed $20 billion. Presidential candidates alone raised and spent approximately $2 billion. Congressional candidates — House and Senate combined — raised $3.8 billion and spent $3.7 billion. Super PACs and outside groups poured in another $4.5 billion in independent expenditures. And over $1 billion of that came from so-called “dark money” — contributions routed through nonprofits that are not legally required to disclose their donors.

Twenty billion dollars. To influence one election cycle.

Now let’s do some basic arithmetic that nobody in the political press seems particularly eager to run.

Approximately 155 million votes were cast in the 2024 presidential election. Divide $16 billion in federal election spending by 155 million votes and you get a cost of roughly $103 per vote — that’s what campaigns, super PACs, party committees, and outside groups collectively spent per ballot cast, on average, across the entire country.

In competitive swing states, where the money is disproportionately concentrated, that number climbs dramatically. In Pennsylvania, where both sides poured in over $65 million just in the final weeks, the cost-per-targeted-vote in key precincts ran into the hundreds of dollars. Senate races in states like Montana and Ohio saw individual campaigns spend $50 to $80 per vote cast in their state. Some contested House seats — won or lost by a few thousand ballots — effectively translated into campaign spending of $500 or more per decisive vote when you account for all the advertising, ground operations, and direct mail deployed in those districts.

Now here’s the question that should be on every election integrity reformer’s lips: what does it actually cost to harvest a ballot?

In states where paid collection is legal or loosely regulated, ballot harvesting operations have been documented paying collectors between $10 and $25 per ballot delivered, sometimes more. In some documented cases, the “compensation” isn’t even cash — it’s grocery delivery, utility bill assistance, gift cards, or other in-kind services that skirt the technical definition of vote-buying while achieving the same practical effect. California law prohibits compensation “based on the number of ballots returned” — but paying a collector a flat daily wage to work a neighborhood collecting as many ballots as possible is entirely permissible. The legal distinction exists. The practical difference is negligible.

So let’s be precise about what the numbers suggest. If a well-funded political organization can move 100,000 ballots through a harvesting operation at an all-in cost of $25 each — covering collector wages, transportation, organizational overhead, and voter outreach — that’s $2.5 million. For the same $2.5 million spent on television advertising in a major media market, you might move the needle by a fraction of a percentage point among persuadable voters who are actually paying attention to the ad. The harvesting operation, by contrast, delivers 100,000 completed ballots with a high probability of party-aligned votes, since collectors are targeting known registered voters in carefully selected precincts.

The return on investment isn’t even close.

This is not a hypothetical scenario constructed to make a political point. It is the logical conclusion of the system as it currently exists. When campaigns are spending $103 per vote on average through legitimate advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts — and when the same outcome can potentially be achieved at a fraction of that cost through organized ballot collection with minimal regulatory oversight and zero reporting requirements — the economic incentives are pointing in one direction and one direction only.

You don’t need to allege widespread fraud to find this troubling. You just need to be able to read a spreadsheet.

The irony is almost elegant: the same political apparatus that has normalized the spending of $20 billion to influence a single election cycle has simultaneously resisted any meaningful accountability framework for the one activity in that system that delivers the most votes for the fewest dollars. If the goal were simply to win elections at the lowest possible cost, ballot harvesting — in states where it is legal, unlimited, and completely untracked — is by far the most efficient tool in the box.

And nobody is required to report how many ballots they collected, how much they paid to collect them, or who funded the operation.

What Real Election Integrity Would Look Like

If the goal is actually secure elections — not partisan advantage — the conversation needs to evolve past “show me your ID at the door.” Real election integrity requires a multi-point framework that includes secure voter registration rolls, reliable ID verification tied to mail-in ballot requests, strict and auditable chain-of-custody requirements for absentee ballot collection, meaningful and enforced penalties for harvesting fraud, and transparent post-election auditing.

Reasonable people can debate the specifics. But those who care genuinely about the integrity of the process — from both parties — should be willing to acknowledge that a strict photo ID requirement at the polling place, while perhaps symbolically important, doesn’t address what may be the most scalable threat to election security today.

And those who reflexively oppose any form of voter verification should acknowledge that an election system with no meaningful identity checks is a system with structural vulnerabilities — regardless of how rarely those vulnerabilities are currently exploited.

The Bottom Line

Voter ID laws are real policy with real consequences for real voters. The NCSL’s own data shows that tens of millions of Americans live under varying standards of election verification — and that inconsistency alone creates legitimate questions about fairness and uniformity.

But let’s not mistake the loudest argument for the most important one. The debate about whether an undocumented immigrant can walk into a polling place and cast an undetected vote is largely a political performance. The debate about whether loosely regulated ballot collection operations can be weaponized to distort election outcomes is a structural governance question — and it deserves far more serious attention than it’s getting.

The people who benefit from keeping your eye on one threat while the other goes largely unexamined aren’t interested in election security. They’re interested in election outcomes.

There’s a difference.

Sources: National Conference of State Legislatures, Voter ID Laws — ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id

NexfinityNews.com is committed to investigative journalism that follows the evidence, not the narrative.Let’s dig into this.