Justin Levitt brings some facts to lights:
I’ve been tracking allegations of fraud for years now, including the fraud ID laws are designed to stop. In 2008, when the Supreme Court weighed in on voter ID, I looked at every single allegation put before the Court. And since then, I’ve been following reports wherever they crop up.
To be clear, I’m not just talking about prosecutions. I track any specific, credible allegation that someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls, in any way that an ID law could fix. So far, I’ve found about 31 different incidents (some of which involve multiple ballots) since 2000, anywhere in the country. If you want to check my work, you can read a comprehensive list of the incidents below.
To put this in perspective, the 31 incidents below come in the context of general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014. In general and primary elections alone, more than 1 billion ballots were cast in that period.
Drum calculates a fraud rate of 0.00002 percent:
Also worth noting: every single one of these cases involves just one or a few people. There’s not a single credible case in the past 15 years of any kind of organized voter impersonation scam of the kind that might actually affect the outcome of an election. There’s just no there there.
Bernstein adds that there “is voter fraud in the U.S., but not of the kind that voter ID is supposed to prevent”:
Most current ID laws — Wisconsin is a rare exception — won’t stop fraud with absentee ballots because measures requiring ID at the polls push more people into the absentee system, where there are plenty of real dangers. Nor will it prevent vote-buying, coercion, fake registration forms, voting from the wrong address or ballot-box stuffing by officials.
These types of voter or election fraud have been documented. But to believe that polling-place voter impersonation is a real problem, you also have to believe that those responsible are super geniuses(because unlike all other election crooks they never get caught), and that these masterminds have chosen the most difficult, inefficient and clunky ways to steal elections.
Alice Ollstein provides the above GIF:
With Republican-controlled states currently fighting the Obama Administration in court over their voting laws, and claiming they need measures to combat voter fraud, the Harvard study is only the latest to find that such fraud is nearly non-existent. … Still, the myth persists, and as minority turnout increases nationwide, the states with the highest rates of participation in communities of color are also the states most likely to pass voter ID laws and other measures proven to suppress minority votes.
The Dish 