A better question would be why you wouldn't require a voter id. The voter suppression claim is nonsense. You need an ID to practically do anything in this country. There is no burden. 60% of Democrats support the requirement of a voting id.
But there is a burden, because obtaining an ID can require driving, waiting for hours at the DMV, paying money to apply, or a combination, all of which can be burdens for low-income households and rural households [1][2]. Homeless people face additional obstacles to getting an ID, including having to fill in a residential address [3]. If you're transgender or gender non-binary, updating an ID you becomes a burden [4].
> A better question would be why you wouldn't require a voter id.
A question that isn't for you in particular to answer is, in the current day and age, would the number of fraudulent ballots prevented by a new strict voter ID requirement be greater than the number of valid votes prevented by such a requirement? The current legal framework of obtaining government-issued IDs makes strict voter ID laws de facto voter suppression. 30 million people lacked a driver's license as of 2022 [2], and I'd be willing to bet that at least 1 million of them are US citizens of voting age. Let's assume that 25% of them would vote if they had the option to do so from their homes (a arbitrary but conservative hypothetical percentage in light of actual voter turnout percentages [5]). There's been no national election with 250000 fraudulent ballots. Any new voter ID bill that doesn't take this into account will almost certainly be voter suppression. The problem isn't the principle of requiring a voter ID. It's that the laws around getting an ID need to change prior to or simultaneously with laws that make ID a requirement for voting.
[1] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-low-income-communit...
[2] https://www.mapresearch.org/id-documents-report
[3] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-105435
[4] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-transgender-nonbina...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...
But both of those properties are conveniently paraded to distract each respective side from the real and "pretty normal" suggestion of having voter ID. Just because documentation means some people don't get to vote, doesn't mean it's not a good ideal for us to work towards whilst also fixing the fact that circumstance and difficulty prevent some people from having said documents.
I'm really surprised at the pushback for Voter ID stuff here of all places. To make a loose/wonky analogy: I can not for the life of me figure out why people want to have "records" of their national population in a database table with no PK and no deduplication effort. And when you get API requests on a "/user/vote" endpoint you do some sort of weird fuzzy matching to get a record that may or may not exist, or is in a separate table called "registered voter" which has no FK to the first and was also filled in with some API request that never definitively links to the first record. And then after all of this, hoping and double-ing down on the claim that the final record count is exact, true and there was no shenanigans that happened in gathering said count. It baffles the mind, and the older and more cynical I get, the more I'm thinking this is done consciously and on-purpose and we're all being gaslight to think that it's normal and that any attempts to fix this are actually just one side trying to push their agenda to suppress the other.