Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Two arguments were prominent in the Texas Senate debate over requiring voters to present a photo ID or other forms of identification.

Here's a look at both:

• Opponents said that 1.2 million voting-age Texans do not have a driver's license, the easiest form of identification to produce under the proposed law, and would be discouraged from voting.

The number came from Dustin Rynders, a lawyer with Advocacy Inc., a nonprofit that focuses on disability rights.

Rynders received data on voter registration cards filed after Jan. 1, 2006, when the Help America Vote Act began requiring all registrants to provide a driver's license or photo ID number — or the last four digits of their Social Security number if they didn't have either ID.

He found that 8 percent submitted Social Security numbers, which extrapolates out to 1,270,268 eligible Texas voters without a photo ID.

It's a rough estimate, Rynders concedes, but "it's a conservative number, too," because it does not sample large numbers of elderly voters — many of whom do not have a driver's license — who registered long before 2006.

Bill Noble of Secure and Fair Elections Texas, an advocacy group working in favor of the bill, laughed off the 1.2 million estimate as "pulling numbers out of a hat."

Better numbers, he said, show that in 2007, more than 19.3 million Texas adults had a photo ID, while there were 12.6 million registered voters.

• Opponents also faulted Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott for spending $1.5 million investigating election fraud but finding very little.

The cost is closer to $690,000 to prosecute 30 election code cases since 2006 — a number that will grow because seven cases are still pending, according to Abbott's office.

Twenty-two cases ended with guilty pleas or verdicts, and one case was recently dropped.

The $1.5 million figure came from 2006 announcements by Abbott and Gov. Rick Perry that a $1.5 million federal grant would pay for investigating and prosecuting election fraud, said Matt Angle, director of Lone Star Project, a Democratic group.

Jerry Strickland, an Abbott spokesman, said only $93,000 in grant money was spent on the 30 indictments. The agency's budget accounted for the rest of the expense — 9,066 hours of investigator and prosecutor time.