South American countries with per capita incomes that sometimes are an order of magnitude smaller than the US managed to have national IDs for free to their entire population, and have required voter IDs for decades.
This is a mind boggling American superstition, it is not reasonable to suppose that the poors in America are so poor that they can’t have access to something the poor in Peru or Paraguay have.
Part of the issue is that you don't need an ID in America for most of your daily life. Most people get it to drive - if you don't have a car (which is actually expensive) then you may not get an ID at all. Yea most people will get an ID, but it's not something people need.
When it comes to the cost of the ID, part of the cost is taking time out of work to sit in a crummy office and fill out paperwork. They require certain proof of identity paperwork that can be hard to get for certain walks of life. Its quite an edge case in society that can't produce a small amount of paperwork to self-identify, of course.
Its a small cohort that truly don't have the resources to get an ID, but there is almost no observed downside to not requiring IDs to vote - American elections are and have been perfectly legitimate (or until 2020, depending on who you ask...). Why would we put up extra barriers to vote when we could just... not?
