Voter ID Laws should be enacted as a preventive measure to prevent voting fraud
however
score: 6
If this is done, you certainly cannot charge for the necessary identification, and you must make it relatively easy for someone to obtain. Otherwise you essentially have a voter tax.
I've never understood why voter id laws must necessarily discriminate against minorities. Even a minority has an identity. If he or she can demonstrate that identity, and that identify is a qualified voter (qualified by age, etc), then he/she can vote.
We have a secret ballot. If one were to vote fraudulently how would their vote be negated from the total without discarding someone else's legitimate vote by accident? It is easier to stop a fraudulent vote from going into the pool then to fish the fraudulent vote out.
Fraudulent votes only affect the outcome of an election when they occur in large enough numbers within one district to be detectable by statistical and population analysis; therefore, the way to assure accurate election results is to normalize the data.
The Wikipedia article is about voter fraud through history throughout the world; The small section with a US example is about turnout buying, which voter ID cards would not address. (Assuming original claim was about voter ID laws in the US.)
We can observe the many, many, many shenanigans in Broward County, Florida specifically over the past 20 years as ample evidence of the fallibility of voting systems. Even computerized ones are known to have been tampered with, and are trivial to hack into in penetration tests.
Only 10 cases of voter impersonation, the only form of voter fraud preventable by voter ID, have been found from 2000-2012, in a country with 146 million voters.
This figure does not include cases which were not found. The figure may be far greater, as a corrupt polling station manager and team would be nearly impossible to catch.
lcid937
