Tova Wang says newly elected Republicans are pushing state-level voter-ID laws designed to disenfranchise minority voters.
Given the sense of urgency behind these laws, one would expect that on Election Day, droves of people scheme to fix elections by impersonating other voters. That’s not the case. The type of fraud that voter-identification laws would address — that is, impersonation of another voter at the polling place — is exceedingly rare. An extensive analysis by professor Lori Minnite at Barnard College showed that at the federal level, only 24 people were convicted of or pleaded guilty to illegal voting between 2002 and 2005, an average of eight people a year. The available state-level evidence of voter fraud, which Minnite culled from interviews, newspapers, and court proceedings, was also negligible. It included 19 people who were ineligible to vote — five because they were still under state supervision for felony convictions and 14 who were not U.S. citizens — and five people who voted twice in the same election. Even an intensive five-year investigation by the Department of Justice under George W. Bush famously netted only 86 voter-fraud convictions. Most of these were for offenses like vote-buying schemes or ineligible voters registering to vote — not for voter fraud that could have been prevented by a voter-ID law.
