Voter ID laws have been written in a way that they can be systematically (and I believe deliberately) abused to disenfranchise minorities. This is done by setting unreasonable office hours or locations to obtain voter IDs among other methods.
There is no need for voter ID laws and so there will be no bipartisan support for them unless both sides are interested in vote suppression.
As far as voter suppression, the whole point of what I wrote is that it's not inherent in voter ID. It only happens if the laws are deliberately designed that way. Again, look into how people vote in most European countries to see that it's not what these kinds of laws are actually about, when they're done right.
BTW, my perspective is that of a non-citizen on a track to citizenship. I think that even if real-world voter fraud is very low, there's also the question of symbolism at play. Voting is one of the few rights that are citizen-exclusive, so it is important to protect, even if only as a symbolic gesture. This goes both ways, of course - the right to vote shall not be denied to anyone who has it (and that part has priority for the same reason as presumption of innocence) - but conversely, if it is to be treasured, it needs to be secured to highlight its worth.
In many areas in America the hours for polling stations coincide with the typical workday. It can also take quite literally hours to reach your proper polling station to vote where taking any time off from work for many of the lower-class citizens is impossible. Proper ID for voting can also be harder to come across than you might think especially when access to them in minority or poor neighborhoods is deliberately limited. That's just to reach the location; never mind it potentially taking hours to just vote [1].
When you look at voter ID laws in a vacuum there isn't that much of an issue. However European countries have a far lower barrier to entry both for the act of voting and for getting a proper ID. When people talk about implementing voter ID in various areas; they're putting the cart before the horse, often intentionally because they know it benefits their voter base.
And as I've mentioned before voter ID solves very little. If you make it hard to vote just for a symbolic measure you're essentially admitting that you want to discriminate against minorities and the poor just for the sake of it.
[1] http://www.brennancenter.org/publication/election-day-long-l...
All the issues you describe are, again, issues with a specific implementation. Voting day can (and should) be moved to a weekend. Government-issued IDs should be free and easy - I would even say automatic - to get. And so on, and so forth.
Voter ID does not have to make voting hard. I would not support any proposal that would do so (which is to say, any that I've seen pushed in US to date). However, I cannot in good faith support a principled opposition to voter ID as such. And - speaking as a card-carrying member of the party - I believe that Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot by continually misrepresenting the core idea as racist etc. They should instead come up with a comprehensive voting reform proposal that would tackle all these issues - election security (including ID), voter registration, election day timing etc. And put it on the table with great fanfare. Then let Republicans explain why they're still opposed to it.
There's also an established history of voter ID laws in other countries not being used to suppress votes. This isn't a hypothetical, either.
From which directly follows that voter ID is not racist. The right-wing politics around voter ID in US specifically is racist. If lefties keep letting right-wing own the subject, then that's all it'll ever be. But it doesn't have to be that way.
This country has a long and well documented history of voter suppression and voter ID is just the latest example.
You’re going to have to do better than “other countries do it” to convince me voter ID laws are a good idea. Start with any evidence of necessity and a how the south won’t abuse the hell out of it. Remember that they have already abused the hell out of it.
Furthermore, in US specifically, right to vote is not even a guaranteed right for citizens - there's nowhere in the constitution that says a citizen has an inherent right to vote. There are various amendments that prohibit the government from discriminating based on certain traits (gender, race, age, poll tax etc); but none of them are a blanket grant of the right. This is why the states can prohibit felons from voting, for example, and why the criteria for that are so drastically different between them.
Now, personally, I think this is not a good idea, and every citizen should have an unconditional right to vote that can only be stripped with citizenship. But you insist that we talk about US as it is - and that is how it is.
The way you implement voter ID such that South can't abuse it is by using the constitutional power of Congress to set uniform rules for all congressional elections in the country. Since citizenship is a federal matter, it follows that voter eligibility as it pertains to citizens and non-citizens is also a federal matter, and should be set on the appropriate level. It would completely preempt any state legislation on this, solving the problem once and for all. This also means that the feds should be required to issue an ID that is sufficient to vote to any citizen who asks for one, at no cost to the citizen, and with minimal hassle - ideally, automatically - same as every other government in the world does.
And I disagree that symbols don't matter. The right to vote is valuable in part because of its exclusivity - not everybody has it. If you're unwilling to protect that exclusivity, even symbolically, that diminishes the right.
A well-written voter ID law - one that truly guarantees the right to vote for every citizen eligible to do so - might well get enough bipartisan support; I'm just not aware of anyone ever trying such a thing.