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.
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!
> 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...
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?
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)
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?
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.
[1] http://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2019-01/fraga...
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.
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).
How do we get this done?
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.
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.
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).
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.
Still satisfied with your argument?
It'd be one thing to put those laws in place in response to pervasive fraud, but historically we just have lawmakers explicitly saying they did it to reduce voter turnout which is... kind of a mistake.
Whether or not ID is issued to non-citizens is a massively different issue. People need ID for all sorts of stuff - that doesn't mean everyone with ID is automatically going out there and skipping work to stand in line to vote.