A pair of local nonprofit organizations that promote voting rights say Idaho’s voting laws make it more difficult to hold voter registration drives and make it harder for some eligible voters to vote.
However, Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane said voter registration numbers for young voters between the ages of 18 to 25 have remained consistent. He also said there are multiple ways for a voter to prove identification and residency, and an Idaho judge has ruled the state’s voting laws are constitutional.
The groups, Babe Vote and the League of Women Voters of Idaho, say Idaho’s identification and proof of residency requirements create barriers to voting that affect students and older voters alike.
Olivia Luna, a 21-year-old Idaho college student and Babe Vote leader, said a pair of 2023 state laws that removed student IDs as an acceptable form of identification for voting hurt students and young people especially hard.
House Bill 124 removed student IDs as an acceptable form of identification for voting.
House Bill 340 also removed student IDs as an acceptable form of identification and standardized voter registration requirements for in-person registration and online registration. House Bill 340 also required the Idaho Transportation Department to create and offer no-fee identification cards that are accepted for voting.
Luna said many students frequently move between their parents’ house, dorms and apartments throughout their academic career, making it difficult to prove residency from a list of documents accepted by the state.
For people who don’t drive and don’t have a driver’s license, or for students who have a current out-of-state driver’s license, Luna said state voting requirements create unnecessary hurdles for young people to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
“I would say it puts up a pretty significant road block for most students,” Luna said.
Luna said Babe Vote paused its voter registration efforts after the laws took effect, and the laws continue to make Babe Vote’s voter registration and outreach efforts difficult.
Luna said she appreciates the opportunities to work with McGrane’s office. But she said the technology at voteIdaho.gov can still be unreliable or tricky for some users, and she said that even though there is a free ID available, it can still be difficult to make the trip and provide a different set of state documents necessary to get the state ID.
“It’s free to get, but you still have to go in-person to the DMV, and you still need to be able to get there, which is difficult for those of us who don’t have cars,” Luna said.
Republican state legislators who supported the 2023 laws said there was a lack of uniformity, a lack of security features and a lack of sophistication for student IDs. They said that state and federal IDs include enhanced security features to project against forgery or reproduction, which student IDs don’t have.
“At the end of the day, these laws would not be in place if it weren’t for the secretary of state, and saying that nothing has changed or it is just as easy to vote as before these laws is just factually incorrect, and I’d appreciate it if that was acknowledged,” Luna said.
Idaho secretary of state said voters have multiple options to meet requirements and free IDs are available
McGrane said young voter registration and voting numbers have always been low, and it’s not a unique problem to Idaho or a new problem.
After reviewing voting statistics and demographic information with his staff, McGrane said the decrease in the youngest, first time voters that Babe Vote is seeing in 2025 and 2026 is because there was not a presidential election during this year’s election or last year’s election.
McGrane said whether or not a presidential election is taking place – not changes to voter registration and identification requirements – is the decisive factor of whether young people register and vote. McGrane said young voter registration and voting numbers peak every four years during presidential election cycles, while fewer young voters get registered for the first time and vote during years with local elections or legislative elections.
Presidential elections drive turnout and registration among all ages and demographics, McGrane said, not just young people.
For example, overall voter turnout was about 29% during the November 2025 election, a local election year. But overall voter turnout was almost 78% during the November 2024 election, a presidential election.
“There’s an ebb and flow,” McGrane said. “So you have a presidential year, it goes up. And then it drops down, and then it goes up and it drops down again.”
McGrane said voting is important and he regularly speaks at Idaho colleges and universities to talk to young people about voting and registering. He also said his office has updated the www.voteIdaho.gov website so that eligible voters can upload a photo of their acceptable form of ID along with a selfie to register to vote without having to go anywhere in person or fill out any physical documents. He said those changes are designed to give voters options and make it convenient to register.
The Idaho Secretary of State’s Office also mails out information voter pamphlets to every Idaho household and takes out ads designed to share election information about guide voters to the services available through www.voteidaho.gov.
McGrane also said student IDs were rarely used as a form of identification by voters in Idaho. For example, in the November 2022 election, before the laws were passed, 104 Idaho voters used a student ID to vote. That’s out of more than 400,000 voters that were checked-in on poll books across the state during that election, officials with the Idaho Secretary of State’s Office said.
State officials also pointed out that Babe Vote and the League Of Women Voters of Idaho filed a lawsuit over Idaho’s voting laws, but a judge in 2023 found that the laws were constitutional and dismissed the lawsuit.
McGrane said he is trying to raise awareness about elections and make it easier for eligible voters to register and participate. McGrane said it has long been an issue that young voters don’t vote as frequently as older voters.
McGrane said he wrote an op-ed in 2014 saying that young people don’t vote.
“I said ‘young people don’t vote,’ and we shared a bunch of stats and I defined young people as anyone under 60,” McGrane said. “And it’s because in that cycle it was a midterm election and it wasn’t until (age) 60 that more than 50% of the voting age population showed up and voted.”
League of Women voters says older Idahoans also have challenges meeting registration laws
Although it is not related to the changes with student IDs, Idaho’s voter registration and residency laws also create roadblocks for older Idaho voters, League of Women Voters of Idaho President Jean Henscheid said.
Henscheid and League of Women Voters of Idaho Statewide Voter Service Director Kendal Shaber said it is very difficult for older adults who don’t drive and have stopped traveling (and no longer have a passport) to meet the photo ID requirements in Idaho.
Because voting is tied to identification requirements, Henscheid said older Idahoans who don’t have a driver’s license, state ID card or passport now need to have their certified birth certificate to get a state-issued ID that is accepted for voting.
For older women who have married and divorced, they also need marriage licenses and divorce decrees from each marriage and divorce if their name does not match the name on their birth certificate, Henscheid said.
Henscheid said she’s helped older women voters who said the process to get all of their required documents and receive their state-issued ID for voting took six months or longer.
“Before these laws were put in place, we were able to do hundreds of voter registration support events, and we were helping hundreds of people in assisted living and nursing homes,” Henscheid said. “Now, we’ve really slowed down our outreach because it is so incredibly difficult.”
