The point is that the irrational fear has to be addressed. Making fun of it, ignoring it, or lecturing on why the threat is imaginary won't help.
Every democrat I know wants elections to be more secure than they are. They just also want them to be fair. There's been a lot of room for proactive measures here that democrats could have been pushing for, but there have been efforts too (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/17/1007715994/manchin-offers-a-v...)
https://www.elections.on.ca/en/voting-in-ontario/id-to-vote-...
Some US states have voting ID requirements, and they tend to be (though not always!) significantly stricter than that, sometimes requiring a specifically a government-issued photo id, for instance.
I’m pretty sure laws that have much looser definitions of “ID” and/or provision resources to ensure timely, free, and easy access to such an ID, see less resistance from democrats. If the entire pro-ID movement just wanted to do what Ontario does it’d be less of a contentious issue, I think.
[edit] for the record, though, I agree this is a place Democrats could safely give ground—the data do not well-support their disenfranchisement concerns, and 30+ states already have some kind of voter id law.
It is, separately, also true that there is no evidence there’s any actual reason to enact more of these laws. The data also don’t support that, at all. But whatever, it’s probably not significantly harmful, just a minor waste of resources.
That’s the risk when the measure is more-or-less harmless but also the problem it addresses isn’t real. They can just keep claiming the problem still exists and running on it.
They’ve been beating this drum for what, fifteen years at this point? More? They should at least have found smoke, if not fire, instead they just keep saying they smell a raging forest fire and coming back with single burnt matches when given the reigns of government to go look for it and tell us what they find.
Being able to cast a vote illegally is trivially easy because there are exceptions baked into the system like provisional ballots. Lucky there is an thorough audit process so having that vote actually counted while avoiding election fraud charges is a lot harder.
I wish that democrats had spent less time telling republicans that the boogeyman doesn't exist and more time showing them how we're going to keep them safe from the boogeyman. In WI, there was a referendum question that asked if people wanted to add language to the state constitution which would explicitly specify that only US citizens could vote. The democrats fought against that saying that election fraud was basically non-existent and that it would be a waste of time to change anything since it's already illegal for non-citizens to vote.
They fucked up though, because no matter how right the democrats were about the safety of elections the fear republican voters have is very real and it's never a waste of time to ease those fears.
As it turns out, if the referendum passes (and I'm guessing that it has) the result will be replacing language which says that every US citizen gets to vote with language which says only US citizens get to vote. It never said anything about replacing language in the referendum question voters saw though. The fear of illegal immigrants voting has likely been used to remove language protecting the right of US citizens to vote in WI and could open the door for laws that prevent certain US citizens from voting.
Since Democrats and Republicans are in full agreement that only US citizens should be able to vote the smart thing democrats should have done was push to add language explicitly stating that only citizens can vote but without replacing anything else. That would have satisfied the fearful republicans and protected the voting rights of all citizens. Instead they just wanted to lecture republicans about voter fraud statistics.
Every parent who has checked under their child's bed or looked in their closet for "monsters" understands this. When you have people acting like frightened children about something that isn't real, sometimes you just have to comfort them.
This is the same problem democrats have when republicans say they are afraid of small children going to school and getting sex change operations. Trump tells them it happens which is scary. Democrats just want to tell them that they are misinformed and that little kids aren't getting surgery, but they'd be smarter to say "You're right, little children getting sex changes at school is a horrible thing and we are putting forward a law that would ban that practice so that no child gets sex change surgery!". Why do democrats keep letting these issues both sides agree on become arguments that divide us?