[travmatt]

Please don't misconstrue what I said, the republicans have been engaged in litigation to repeal various portions of the voting rights act in numerous courts through America. This is quite separate from voter laws and it is a separate voting suppression tactic altogether.

To the voter id laws, I can provide studies showing that in person vote fraud is non existent in America - the majority of cases last election stemmed from trump voters who tried to defend their actions as 'testing the system.' I can also provide studies that show those voter is laws disproportionately impact minority voters, as well as court judgements where republicans were found to target said voter with these laws explicitly - as in that was their explicit goal, and acted with 'surgical orecision6', in the courts words. This is not to mention the circumstantial evidence, like republican operatives explaining their long term goal is disenfranchisement, or the actions of governors instructing dmv employees to deceive the public and closure of dmv's in minority areas.

I'd be open to hear alternative interpretations as to what is happening, but so far my experience has been that those in favor of said laws either approve of disenfranchisement, or have an emotional response as to the 'fairness' of the law, and assume i should adopt their viewpoint.

[WalterBright]

I regularly hear that voter fraud is non-existent. However, in California only a utility bill is required to register to vote. How does a study determine that those represent actual citizens?

[travmatt]

State level political parties have the power to challenge the registration of voters within their boundaries.

[unprepare]

you're unclear about how voter fraud is investigated, and your solution to that is to create more legislation about voting? That is deeply unsettling.

[greglindahl]

Information about who voted is public.

[Veelox]

>This is not to mention the circumstantial evidence, like republican operatives explaining their long term goal is disenfranchisement

I am curious, can provide a citation for your comment? I have heard this claim (or something similar) before but have never seen hard evidence.

[mherdeg]

> To the voter id laws, I can provide studies showing that in person vote fraud is non existent in America

I think it might be better to say "irrelevant to the outcome of an election" than "non existent".

One kind of in-person vote fraud which can be measured is voting twice: mail in a ballot in one district and vote in person in another district, or (more rare) vote in person in two districts. There were as an order of magnitude guess 400-1000 people who voted twice in both Florida and New York in 2000.

And other isolated incidents have been detected, e.g. in 2002 perhaps as many as a few hundred people in Kansas voted in person in two different districts (sometimes two places in Kansas, sometimes one in Kansas and one in Missouri).

See http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/200... for the sources here; local newspapers pulled the voter records and cross-checked duplicate names by hand, reaching out to individual people to ask their stories.

The issue of whether or not voter fraud is a serious national problem was a big deal in the early 2000s, when the executive branch of the federal government put a LOT of work into trying to find and prosecute voter fraud which they believed was a big deal. They were generally unable to find lots of fraud and their failure to find significant fraud was a big part of the reason that a bunch of US attorneys were, controversially, fired - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_co... , https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publicatio... .

With respect to the "vote as someone else" in-person fraud problem, that's a lot harder to measure. It seems like if it were an endemic problem we would have found it the last time we went hunting 10-15 years ago.

Still I am definitely sympathetic to the idea that everyone should be issued a free, easy-to-get national ID card. Perhaps we should get that system up and running and as soon as there are fewer than (say) 100 cases per year of people being denied an ID despite presenting sufficient documentation, we can think about requiring it at the polls. (When ID-issuance goes wrong it goes really wrong -- see e.g. https://www.thenation.com/article/wisconsin-is-systematicall... ).