What evidence exists to ascertain the level of it? Without ID requirements I can walk in to a voting booth and claim I’m Joe Blow and vote, if the real Joe Blow doesn’t vote who knows about the fraud and how?
It’s a heated issue, both sides say it happens a lot or doesn’t in significant quantities. How do they know?
There are at least a few statistical markers.
Just as one example, a college kid I know (this was many years ago) voted twice. He registered once at his college digs and once at his parents’ home. But he made the mistake of boasting about it, and he was found out.
It isn’t totally an undetectable crime.
There was a 10-year investigation started by the Bush administration justice department that came up with just about nothing. This makes sense, as in-person voter fraud is both extremely risky and extremely unproductive. Congratulations, you’ve just committed a felony for one extra vote. It would take a very large, concerted conspiracy to shift the results of even a single district by any manageable degree. Oh, and by the way? What there is a lot of is absentee voter fraud. At least, compared to in-person; the ratio is something like 1:40.
When you vote as Joe Blow, you sign the voting log book under the name Joe Blow. A book that is public information.
Then, some enterprising genius could call Joe Blow (and many other registered voters) on the phone, and ask if he voted in the most recent election. If he says he didn’t and the log book says he did, that would be evidence that something is wrong.
Clearly, then, we need Absentee Voter ID laws! 
Seriously, is this true? Because states are shifting to ALL absentee voting-- or mail in ballots, which are essentially the same. Oregon is already there. I’ve been voting by mail in CA for 25 years, and I think we’re up to about 25% of all ballots cast being mail-in; maybe more.
Well, here in Texas as long as I’ve been a voter (since 1990), the procedure has been that when you show up to your designated polling place, you have to have your voter registration card OR your ID, and they use that to verify you and look you up in the registered voter book, where you sign your name next to where it’s printed. Lately, the law’s changed to require the ID even if you have the voter registration card.
So prior to the law change, the main fraud avenues I can see would be to somehow register in two places at the same time, or to have a fraudulent voter-registration card for another precinct (or more). Ostensibly, the recent ID requirement would eliminate the second type of fraud (not that I think it was ever prevalent), but not the first.
That said, the first kind can happen; I moved from Houston to Dallas, and re-registered in my new county, and about a year later my Dad calls me up and asks if I’d re-registered in Dallas, because for the past year he’d seen my name right below his on the signature book. I’d voted several times in Dallas by that point, so I could have voted in both places if I wanted to go to the trouble, since I was on the books in both places. I finally had to send the Houston people a letter asking them to take me off their lists since I didn’t live there anymore and was registered in Collin County at that point.
You’re questioning whether or not it’s far more likely that voter impersonation occurs via mail vs. in person?
It’s trivially easy to impersonate someone through the mail, you don’t have to look someone in the eye and lie about who you are, you don’t have to sign the book right in front of them, you can pretend to be your Aunt Bessie, even if you’re a dude. You just fill out the form and mail it in.
No, I’m questioning exactly what I quoted: That it actually happens at the rate stated.
Electoral researchers writing in the Washington Post estimate that 6.4% of illegal immigrants voted in the 2008 election and 2.2% voted in the 2012 election. That’s substantial enough to decide the outcome in close elections. Perhaps voter fraud isn’t as insignificant an issue as the party that primarily benefits from it would like us to believe.
I think Sitnam in the OP was asking about the kind of fraud that Voter ID laws would affect. The college kid you knew could have voted twice using his ID, so the recent Voter ID laws wouldn’t have stopped that.
Voter fraud is one of those things people are utterly entrenched in opinion on.
Those who believe there’s fraud won’t consider evidence to the contrary. Those who believe there isn’t fraud won’t consider evidence to the contrary.
2 problems to investigate.
How many registered voters are not eligible to vote? This is a very difficult question to answer. Because of the VRA do not have to ever prove that you are eligible to register. Beyond that, it seems like lists based on names are open to problems whether it is voter roles or no-fly lists. If we require a secondary means of ID such as social security numbers, we could probably get some hard numbers such as duplicate registration, non-citizens registered, etc.
As for voter fraud such as what happened to me (someone signed in as me at the poll), a rough estimate could be gotten if it were recorded how many duplicate votes there were. In my case, LA County never recorded why my vote was in the infamous orange envelope.
But we’ve not seen evidence that there is any significant fraud that Voter ID laws would affect. Since there’s such a low prior probability, I need good evidence, and it just doesn’t exist. The reason I place the prior probability so low is that the penalties are severe (it’s a felony), the risk of detection is fairly high, and the reward is extremely low. It’s extremely implausible that there would be any widespread throwing of elections using fraud that Voter ID laws would prevent.
I’d like to hear more about what happened to you.
Another thing to consider is how many eligible voters don’t currently have a photo ID. Here in Texas, that number is close to a million. Is it not a type of fraud, to keep people from voting unnecessarily? “Fraud” may not be the right term for that, technically, but it’s just as bad.
Whaddaya got?
You’re very fond of excluded middles, I note. It is casually possible to recognize that voter fraud occurs, but also that some efforts to ostensibly solve it create even bigger problems.
And those that maintain that there is equal evidence for both sides are people that know there is little real voter fraud of that type out there and are just trying to muddy the waters.
QFT
Talk to the people of Miami.
Not that I’m referring to the type of fraud that voter IDs would have stopped, but it has to be pretty bad when a judge reverses an election and declares the winner.
But the kind of fraud that voter ID laws would have stopped is what we’re discussing. No one claims that there is no fraud in the election system we have, it’s just that voter ID laws don’t address any of that fraud, and they unnecessarily keep tens of thousands of eligible voters from being able to cast their votes.