[flukus]

> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights, its straight up common sense like we have to do for every other thing in society. Many people find it surprising around the world that we don't check IDs.

I agree that it's common sense, but data often trumps common sense. Before you combat voter fraud you first have to establish that it's a real problem. To date no one has shown that it's a real problem.

[Inconel]

I'm pretty much completely uninformed on this issue so please don't take this comment as a challenge to your assertion, but how does the US go about determining whether or not voter fraud is taking place? Do polling/voting officials take some portion of cast ballots and investigate them for fraud and extrapolate the results over the broader voting population?

Apologies if this is a stupid question but I'd love to learn about how the integrity of the voting system is maintained in huge countries like the US.

[jcranmer]

There are several kinds of voter fraud.

First, there's voter impersonation--where you go to a precinct, and claim to be someone else and vote under their name. This tends to be relatively easy to catch; the general estimate of fradulent votes cast in this manner is less than 1 in a million, although there's certainly been more attempts that were easily caught (quite a few people last November tried to do voter impersonation to prove how easy it was and got busted instead). It can't be decisive, because before you get to a margin of victory in this range, you're going to discover that we can't actually ascertain the voting intentions that well (misread ballots happen about ~1 in 10000)--this is basically what happened in 2000; the margin of victory in Florida pretty much depends on what you consider constitutes an actual vote in the ballot.

A related type of fraud is using the vote of someone who should be ineligible to vote. You'll sometimes hear claims of millions of people on the voter rolls who shouldn't be on them, and the people who are concerned about this worry that they will be used for voter impersonation. Most of these cases basically boil down to the state didn't hear that you died or moved. States generally only bother to cross-reference their databases to purge people from these lists every few years, but it's still pretty easy to tell if someone cast a fraudulent vote in the meantime if you compare dates.

The least common case of voter fraud (at least in the US) is outright ballot-stuffing: where precincts lie about the counted results. Most precincts count their results in the presence of observers from independent election monitoring groups and representatives of candidates and political parties, which reduces the scope to commit this kind of fraud.

More common is mail vote fraud, where someone intercepts the votes of people who are voting by mail-in ballot. Estimates of this kind of fraud is perhaps 1 in 100,000--it's still not going to be decisive, since (as said above) the inherent inaccuracy in vote counting will crop up before then.

It's worth point out that there is no national vote in the US. Voting is entirely decided by the states, and many details about how you conduct the vote and vote counting process may be left up to individual counties or sometimes even precincts.

[tomjakubowski]

The kind of fraud that "voter ID laws" are supposed to protect against is "voter impersonation". The fear is that Lisa might know where friend Marge votes, show up to Marge's precinct, pretend to be Marge, and illegally cast a ballot as her. In this way, she could cast multiple ballots in the same election.

As far as I can tell, to pull that off at a big enough scale to affect national or even state elections you'd need to know:

* The voter rolls for a county. I think that, in California anyway, the best you can do is random access by looking up an individual's record using their name, phone number, mailing address, etc. I don't know how one would acquire the entire list of registered voter.

* Near perfect information about which voters will neglect to vote on election day.

The reason you'd need to know the second thing is that many attempts at voter impersonation have been foiled because the impersonated person eventually shows up to vote at their precinct — only to be told they've already voted!

You also need some logistics: enough people to make it worthwhile, vans to shuttle them from precinct to precinct, etc. The whole things seems way too complicated for an organization to pull off without somebody discovering it.

It seems likely to me that voter impersonation could only be a successful tactic in a small town or county's local elections, where you wouldn't need large numbers of people to turn the results in your favor.

[travmatt]

The not-so-hidden secret is that voter id laws would stop one type of fraud - in person voting fraud, or the most logistically challenging and hardest to do. Most old white people rely disproportionately on mail-in voting, oddly enough there are no pushes to restrict access to this method of voting (even though it is the easiest to defraud) - voting fraud legislation tends to focus on the methods that minorities use.

[memmcgee]

That's not really true. Republicans have also fought against having open access to mail in ballots. In many states you need to have a "justification" in order to get a mail-in ballot. If anyone could get a mail-in ballot it would be good for minorities and the poor as you wouldn't have to actually go to the polls.

[Zach_the_Lizard]

Not just red states have this rule. New York, hardly a bastion of conservatism, also restricts absentee voting:

>Qualifications to Vote by Absentee Ballot

>Absent from your county or, if a resident of New York City absent from said city, on Election Day.

>Unable to appear at the polls due to temporary or permanent illness or disability; or because you are the primary care giver of one or more individuals who are ill or physically disabled.

>A patient or inmate in a Veterans' Administration Hospital.

>Detained in jail awaiting Grand Jury action or confined in prison after conviction for an offense other than a felony.

https://www.elections.ny.gov/VotingAbsentee.html

[memmcgee]

The New York State legislature is often controlled by both parties and it's in the GOP's best interests to do what they can to stifle the vote while they have control.

[maxerickson]

The voter rolls are provided to the candidates.

Big campaigns also already build statistical models of likely voter behavior (they use it to try to contact people who they think they can influence).

Still not hordes of people out committing felonies on election day.