[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?