USA Today: Donald Trump is touting voter ID laws as an issue in the 2020 election. Here’s why.

WASHINGTON – As President Donald Trump ramps up his reelection for 2020 he is resurfacing an unsubstantiated gripe from 2016: That voter fraud cost him support.

At rallies and on Twitter, the president has renewed calls for voter ID laws, revisited unproven claims that a large number of people voted fraudulently and signaled that, until those issues are resolved, other pending election measures are going nowhere. …

But many of those laws have faced court challenges and legal setbacks. Wisconsin’s voter ID law has been mired in court challenges for years, for instance. A 2015 lawsuit filed over an Alabama voter ID law is pending in a federal appeals court.

“Republicans in 2011 did it with the express purpose of driving down voter turnout,” said Jay Heck, the longtime executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, where Trump won in 2016 with just under 23,000 votes. …

Opponents of the laws acknowledge that for many Americans, that is true. But, they said, that’s not the case for everybody. For now, groups like Common Cause are spending much of their effort trying to ensure that people obtain an ID needed to vote.

“There are people who are properly registered in this state who, through no fault of their own, have no ID and may have problems getting one,” said Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina. “It’s regrettable that voting has become almost a partisan issue.”