[andrewla]

> because historically it just doesn't happen

I understand the objections to voter ID based on unequal access to acceptable identification.

But I don't understand the "it just doesn't happen" argument. This kind of voter fraud seems like it would be nearly impossible to detect. I guess you could look at how often ballots are spoiled because of signature mismatches or incidences of "the registry shows that you already voted".

It seems like once voter id laws are passed, any laws or regulations limiting access to ID are de facto challengeable under the Equal Protection principle.

[mikeash]

It's trivial to find if you look for it. It's difficult to do with 100% accuracy on election day, but it's easy to find large-scale instances of it afterwards. Consider the various scenarios for the sort of voter fraud that ID requirements would prevent:

1. A person votes using the name of another registered voter. This will be detected any time the registered voter in question also casts a vote. Typically, the second person voting with the same registration will immediately be flagged and told they can't vote because they already voted. Worst case, you find it afterwards by seeing that they "voted twice." This can also be detected in cases where the registered voter didn't cast a vote by asking them whether they actually voted, and seeing who says "no" when the records say "yes."

2. A person votes using the name of a stale registration for a voter who moved away. This can be detected by seeing if the person still actually lives in the area.

3. A person votes using the name of a dead person. Detected by comparing with death records.

4. A non-citizen registers and votes using their own name. You can see who voted and check to see if they really are citizens.

Despite this, there is no evidence of any large-scale voter fraud. Known instances number in the single or at most double digits per year, nationwide. If it's happening, then it must be because nobody has ever gone looking for it. Note that the necessary evidence is all public information, so it's not just a matter of governments not looking for what they don't want to see. You'd have to propose that no university political science research group, no think tank, no public policy center, no lobbyist group, and no political party has ever gone looking for it either. And even if somehow that were true, that voter fraud is a major issue that nobody has ever gone searching for, then the best thing you can say is that these onerous and often discriminatory laws are being passed on the basis of no data, when data could be readily obtained!

[kevingadd]

I apologize for being inaccurate, your final point is the argument I was trying to make. There are examples, but they are double digits. Effectively a rounding error.

[andrewla]

I'm not so sure that gathering this data is as easy as you're making it out to be.

> 1. A person votes using the name of another registered voter

I'm not aware of any comprehensive analysis of how common this is. Ballots are frequently rejected or require provisional ballot (I had to fill out a provisional ballot once in NYC because someone had voted my ballot; no fraud in this case (probably) since the signature in my box was one of the neighboring lines in the book) but I can't find anything definitive saying how often this particular event happens.

> 2. A person votes using the name of a stale registration for a voter who moved away. This can be detected by seeing if the person still actually lives in the area.

This analysis I think is never done; analyses of voter registration routinely show huge numbers of voters who are no longer at the registered address. Once again, no proof here that anything is problematic with this, but I'm not aware of any comprehensive analyses of the scope of the problem (that is, some notion of how often these voted or had a second registration that voted, effectively voting twice. This could theoretically be targeted since voter rolls are semi-public-ish.

> 3. A person votes using the name of a dead person. Detected by comparing with death records.

This is harder than it sounds because people often share names with deceased people, and even addresses for familiar relations. Death records are not always comprehensive, especially if the individual has been deceased for a while. I've seen a couple of one-off analyses on these [1] but nothing that makes me confident that we have a grasp on the scope of the issue.

> 4. A non-citizen registers and votes using their own name

I'm not sure how you'd measure this one at all - in some ways this is the least significant because there are plenty of circumstances where aliens are permitted to vote in local, municipal, or state elections.

We have plenty of laws around preventing electioneering, voter intimidation, vote selling, etc., a voter id law does not seem substantially worse than these for identifying specific voting problems that are difficult to otherwise detect. Motor voter laws ensure that almost every licensed driver is a registered voter. I've seen estimates as low as .3-.6% of registered voters lack a photo id (in states that have instituted an affidavit-based exception to voter id laws); this seems like a small enough number to make me comfortable with voter id laws.

[1] https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/10/27/2-investigators-chic...

[mikeash]

I'm sure it is as easy as I'm making it out to be. I don't mean that it's trivial in the sense that some random person like you or I could go out and figure this out for ourselves. But a research team with decent resources absolutely could. Pick 1,000 voter registrations at random. Check each one for all the things I listed. Come up with a good estimate for how pervasive voter fraud actually is. How much do you suppose such a study would cost?

I can't help but notice that you completely ignored my last paragraph. Do you really believe that nobody has ever attempted what I describe above? And if so, do you really believe it's wise to be passing these laws without doing the research first?

[andrewla]

If you selected a thousand voters at random from Texas, there's a good chance you would not find a single one that doesn't have ID, since only 16,000 of the 9 million voters didn't have ID. I think that's pretty compelling evidence that voter ID laws don't result in widespread voter disenfranchisement.

If you're aware of any research, I'd love to see it. I've seen lots of research into the rate of convictions and prosecutions for detected voter fraud, but never anything as comprehensive as what you are suggesting. If had I had to guess, selecting 1,000 voters from the rolls would result in 900 solid "yes I voted", and 100 failures to validate, everything from not answering the phone to refusing to participate to incorrect records to faulty memory to they've moved away since the election, thus making the resultant study kind of worthless because the error bars are so large.

Trying to track a cohort with a good response rate is hard in any sort of study, but if your cohort is not selected by your team based on initial response (where you have some prior belief that they are not utterly opposed to participation) then I suspect that the response rates are so terrible as to make the research useless.

(As a note, my failure to reply to your last paragraph is not through any desire to avoid the question, but just because my post had already gotten too long)

[mikeash]

Why would you give up and say "failure to validate" just because someone didn't answer the phone or had moved away?

I'm proposing to actually put some real effort into this. If they no longer live in the area, find out when they moved. If they don't answer the phone, track them down. If they're dead, find out when and where they died. For the difficult cases, get some boots on the ground and figure it out. Let's take your numbers and say that 900 of the cases are easy, and 100 are tough. If you dedicate $10 million to the study, then you can spend almost $100,000 to figure out each of the tough cases.

This is well within the resources of a university research team or a lobbying group. If a major political party is convinced that voter fraud is a big problem and needs to be addressed, they could easily front the money needed to come to a definitive conclusion. An electoral commission could do it on a non-partisan basis.

I'm not aware of any such research either. If it's been done, the result has been too boring to report on. If it hasn't been done, then my question remains: why do you want to enact such a major law without doing the research first?

[js2]

Purely from a logistical standpoint, it would be difficult to commit voter fraud in large enough numbers to make a difference in most elections, and get away with it.

An individual here or there might manage to vote more than once by, say, impersonating someone they know won't vote (deceased, moved away, etc), but that's unlikely to make a difference.

To make a difference, it would need to be coordinated and large scale. So how do you round up a sufficient number of people, convince them all to vote illegally, and then keep quiet about it? How do you get them to all the different polling places? How do you ensure that whomever they are voting in place of on the voter rolls is both eligible to vote and hasn't already voted?

Now I'm only going by my voting district. Here, you either absentee vote, early vote, or vote in your precinct. Regardless, you have to give your name, address and signature. They then check you against the voter rolls and record that you've voted. Presumably if I tried to vote again, they'd know I'd already recorded a vote, when and where.

To prevent conflicts, you'd have to in addition commit large scale registration fraud.

Maybe I'm just not sufficiently clever, but whenever I've thought through this, I haven't figure out how it could work.

[andrewla]

It seems unlikely to be able to get the scale required without someone spilling the beans or accidentally getting caught. But things like voter intimidation and vote buying are illegal and we have structural remedies to (attempt to) prevent those. Of 9 million voters in Texas, only 16,000 did not present ID [1] and had to fill out affidavits. I'm unconvinced that the harm of voter id laws is sufficient to balance the peace of mind that we would get by closing up a potential form of voter fraud.

[1] http://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2019-01/fraga...

[js2]

So election security theatre? Color me not convinced. We should be doing everything possible to increase voter turnout in the U.S.

I'll make you a deal. Let's do away with voting machines that don't produce a physical receipt, make voting day a national holiday, and setup automatic voter registration. As part of all that, I'm willing to concede a feel good voter ID measure.

[andrewla]

Hey, if you and I were in charge of things, we'd get stuff done.

Voting machines and physical receipt, times a million.

Voting day a national holiday -- I think it's a mixed blessing given that this is a burden on families, and I'm not sure what exactly a nation holiday entails (restaurants and stores are open on various national holidays, for example, so I'm not sure that all voters would benefit). I'd be willing to give it a try and measure the effects. Weekend voting seems a little easier to manage for a similar effect.

Automatic voter registration I'm not as familiar with; it looks like it's an expansion of motor voter laws, which seems pretty reasonable. If you're a living person eligible to vote you should not really have to do anything except show up. I guess you have to specify a party for states that have party affiliated primaries, but I'd be in favor of making primaries a private function of political parties rather than making them government run.

I'd also be in favor of mandating simplified ballots (the ballots in New York are organized by party rather than candidate, which makes them a mess) and requiring that states distribute a voters guide that enumerates all the ballot options, with statements and candidate information and full text of ballot measures if applicable (Washington state had this when I lived there, and living in New York it's like trying to pull teeth to figure out what they hell your ballot is even going to look like, and ballot measures, forget it -- even getting the full text is often nearly impossible, all you get is the executive summary, no statements for or against or the full text).

[js2]

So we agree on the goals. I like your evidence-based approach to policy making and additional suggestions. I may have been a bit rash with some of my suggestions and appreciate your counter points.

How do we get this done?

[kevingadd]

Many crimes are impossible to detect. That isn't a valid argument for going after crimes in a way that has a proven negative impact on democracy.

The ID laws are already challenged, but the nature of our courts means they remain in place for years while the gears of justice turn.

[andrewla]

The proven negative impact of the voter id laws, as far as I know, is very small. Michigan had .3% non-id voters, and Texas had ~.01% non-id voters. Both states allow voters to fill out an affidavit. These stats were just found offhand, I'm not sure if there's a comprehensive review.

So we have a small proven negative impact on democracy from voter id laws, and a small unproven negative impact from their absence; I don't think it's unreasonable to prevent a crime that is easily preventable under those circumstances.

[mikeash]

The incidence of voter fraud in the 2016 election was approximately 0.000003%.

Why do your numbers get labeled as "proven" and mine as "unproven"? You're eager to declare it to be impossible to figure out how pervasive voter fraud is based on imagined hypothetical difficulties, but you're eager to pull out numbers saying that ID requirements don't discourage people, despite obvious holes in the measurement (such as people who decided not to vote because they don't know about the affidavit).

[blackflame7001]

The whole point of this article is to make elections more secure not be complacent with the status quo. Not having an ID and needing an ID to vote are 2 different issues that democrats insist on making the same. Just give every citizen a free ID. It would cost less than 1 days interest on the national debt. The real reason is because democrats want to turn texas blue like they did to new mexico and dominate elections with just 3 states

[mikeash]

The whole point of the article is that there’s an actual threat to respond to. We should focus on real threats and not imaginary ones.

I’d be happy with requiring ID as long as it’s free and easy for all eligible voters to obtain. That has not been the case with these laws so far.