Chris Beam on how difficult it would actually be to steal an election through voter fraud:
Perhaps the strongest evidence against claims of widespread voter fraud is that it would make no sense. Imagine what you'd have to do to perpetrate such a scheme. You'd first have to recruit a large number of voters willing to cooperate, each of whom would risk five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Then you'd have to get them all registered, which would require fake IDs and mailing address. (The mailing address would have to be real so they could receive their registration cards.) That names and addresses would then get checked against a central state database. If the database fails to find a match, the voter's registration gets flagged for a follow-up check of their Social Security Number or driver's license number. Then on Election Day, they'd have to show their fake ID again and lie to a poll worker's face. At each point—registration, the database check, voting—they'd run the risk of getting caught. And the more people involved in the scheme, the more likely someone slips up. All it would take is one unlucky person for the whole plan to unravel.
In a race with only a few hundred voters, something like this might be feasible. But in order to say, sway even a congressional race, you'd need thousands of people to do this. Every single one of them would have to go through this process flawlessly, and they'd have to do so without breathing a word to a single soul.
Have you been to the DMV? Nothing that involves dealing with a local government bureaucracy ever goes that smoothly, let alone a few thousand times over.
