"How the Sausage Gets Made": Voter ID and Deliberative Democracy

In 2020, Kentucky became the twentieth state to enact a law that requires voters to show a photo ID at the polls to vote. Yet the law is one of the most mild and reasonable photo ID laws to pass in recent memory. This article tells the inside story of how that law came to be. And it presents the broader story of how the process of crafting legislation, when employing a theory of deliberative democracy, can increase legitimacy and produce better results for the functioning of our elections. The Kentucky story therefore offers important lessons for election law policy during this perilous time in our nation’s history.