Well, what we do know is that voter fraud is exceedingly rare. In-person voter fraud, the only type that Voter ID will actually stop, is extremely time-consuming, involves multiple felonies, is fairly easy to check if suspected, and even in the most extreme conspiracy could hardly account for more than a few hundred votes (and that’s a scenario that’s completely unrealistic). So it makes sense that when the Bush administration went hunting for voter fraud, they turned up just about fuck-all. Seriously - the rate is somewhere between 0.0004% and 0.0009%. In other words, in an election, for every 250,000 votes, there’s likely to be *one *fraudulent vote. That’s really nothing. What’s more, there’s no evidence or reason to suggest that this is all going in one direction. For all we know, it may very well be fairly equal in partisanship, and cancel out. There’s no reason to believe that this disproportionately effects one party.
What we also know is that voter ID is not ubiquitous. That is, a lot of people in this country don’t have photo ID. The most recent figure on that placed it around 10%. That is, For every 10 people who vote in an election, there’s likely one of them with no voter ID. Furthermore, there are good reasons to believe that this disproportionately effects one party, as the people by far least likely to have photo ID are college students (hard left), racial minority groups (left), the poor (slight left), the disabled (slight left) and the elderly.
So yes, you absolutely have good reason to believe that the above example is plausible. I’m just going to quote myself here:
I made that post like, 2 years ago, and it still holds true.
So basically, we’re creating a situation where we’re solving a non-problem with a solution that prevents a lot of people, disproportionately people who would vote for more liberal candidates, from voting. And before you say “well, they should just get ID”, keep in mind that if you don’t have photo ID, you’re obviously not driving. Often, it’s as much as 30 miles to the nearest DMV. In one case in Texas, they brought up a man who had to go 120 miles in each direction to get to the nearest place he could get photo ID. What’s more, these places tend to keep standard business hours, making it somewhat difficult to get ID if you work full-time, let alone double shifts. And if you do have to take time off, then you’d better be damn sure that you get everything right the first time. Which is not a given.
And all this, just to be a drop in an ocean of votes? You can blame it on them all you want, but the fact is that you’re putting a non-trivial hurdle for them to jump through, and the end result is less people voting. It’s actually kind of twisted, when you think about it - “Oh, anyone could get ID. If you can’t be fucked to take the time off work, ride your bike 30 miles, wait at the DMV, and potentially have to do it all over again in a week, well, then maybe you just aren’t motivated enough to vote”. If that sounds callous, good - it’s more or less exactly the argument presented by, among others, Bricker and several others in that aforementioned pit thread when they were presented with the aforementioned numbers.
And of course, all of this ignores the fact that absentee ballot fraud is infinitely easier to pull off. Food for thought.