Voter ID laws and Marriage

[Clueless Morgan]

All bolding in this post is mine.

Well, in a quick search, I couldn't find the actual numbers, but I've heard the number of voter fraud cases is extremely low and nowhere near enough of a problem to warrant the attention that the Republicans are giving it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washin...d=all&_r=0

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.
[snip]

In Miami, an assistant United States attorney said many cases there involved what were apparently mistakes by immigrants, not fraud.

In Wisconsin, where prosecutors have lost almost twice as many cases as they won, charges were brought against voters who filled out more than one registration form and felons seemingly unaware that they were barred from voting.

One ex-convict was so unfamiliar with the rules that he provided his prison-issued identification card, stamped “Offender,” when he registered just before voting.

A handful of convictions involved people who voted twice. More than 30 were linked to small vote-buying schemes in which candidates generally in sheriff’s or judge’s races paid voters for their support.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/...out-fraud/

Voter fraud generally rarely happens. When it does, election law experts say it happens more often through mail-in ballots than people impersonating eligible voters at the polls. An analysis by News21, a journalism project at Arizona State University, found 28 cases of voter fraud convictions since 2000. Of those, 14 percent involved absentee ballot fraud. Voter impersonation, the form of fraud that voter ID laws are designed to prevent, made up only 3.6 percent of those cases. (Other types included double voting, the most common form, at 25 percent, and felons voting when they were prohibited from doing so. But neither of those would be prevented by voter ID laws, either.)

FOX News, of all news organizations, on Voter ID laws:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/...ter-fraud/

Several states adopted new laws last year requiring that people show a photo ID when they come to vote even though the kind of election fraud that the laws are intended to stamp out is rare.

Even supporters of the new laws are hard pressed to come up with large numbers of cases in which someone tried to vote under a false identify.
[snip]

"They identified a lot of fraud, but very, very, very, very, very, very little of it could be prevented by identification at the polls," Levitt said.

The remainder involved vote buying, ballot-box stuffing, problems with absentee ballots, or ex-convicts voting even though laws bar them from doing so. Over the same seven-year time period covered by the cases Levitt reviewed, 400 million votes were cast in general elections.

Voter ID laws don't seem to have any effect on turnout...so they don't really warrant the attention the democrats give them. Democrats also only seem to be concerned about voter ID laws in red states like Texas but ignore criticizing voter ID laws in blue states like Rhode Island.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/...ter-fraud/

Texas and South Carolina are awaiting approval for their laws from the Justice Department because of those are among that states with a history of voting rights suppression and discrimination.

Perhaps the reason voter ID laws or more contentious in red states has to do with the historic disenfranchisement of the minorities in those states.

People do need to have confidence in an election and voter ID laws are an effective and clean way of doing that.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/...out-fraud/

Voter impersonation, the form of fraud that voter ID laws are designed to prevent, made up only 3.6 percent of those cases.

Please explain to me how requiring voters to show ID before voting would reduce instances of voter fraud.

I would rather have to show my ID then dip my finger in ink that doesn't wash off for a couple of days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_ink

If all you're interested in is reducing double-voting, the ink would actually be a much better way of preventing that kind of fraud; it's harder to get that ink off your finger than it would be to obtain a fake ID and head back to the polls for a second, third, fourth, fifth round of voting.

But, as with ID laws, no one is making mail-in or absentee voters dip their fingers in ink after they've mailed in their ballots. Even the ink doesn't prevent candidates from buying votes. Even the ink doesn't prevent election officials from "accidentally" loosing a box of ballots from a particularly right- or left-leaning county and skewing election results.