| > 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... ). |