| 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. |