A panel of professors and lawyers hosted by the Harvard Journal on Legislation analyzed the implications of voter identification laws and their potential impact on the presidential election this year, at the Harvard Law School yesterday.

The panel, “Voices on Voting: Election Law in 2008,” said though voter identification laws would alleviate public fears of voter fraud, they would not actually solve the issue and have contributed to contested election results in the past.

Columbia Law School professor Nate Persily said the rules on photo identification vary immensely from state to state, but in general, voters without an ID can only cast a provisional ballot.

When voters have their IDs, they must go to the state elections office to have their votes counted, he said. However, Persily said, few people do this and so their votes go uncounted.

Heather Heidelbaugh, a shareholder in the Litigation Services and Intellectual Property groups of Babst, Calland, Clements and Zomnir, P.C., said she believes the U.S. Supreme Court will decide requiring voter ID does not restrict voters’ rights.

She said some students at the University of Pittsburgh were not registered to vote in Pennsylvania in the 2004 elections and applied for provisional ballots. There were enough ballots and their votes were ultimately not counted in the election, leading to a “mini-riot” — but the incident never made the press, she said.

“I’ve seen fraud. Heidelbaugh said. “I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been involved in the consequences.”

Voting Rights Project Director Laughlin McDonald, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, likened the requirement of voter ID to the literacy requirements and poll taxes of the Jim Crow laws that historically disenfranchised black voters.

He said the reasoning during that era was “a person who can’t read or write should not be trusted with a ballot,” and said ID requirements today are not much different.