Yglesias says most of what needs to be said about the winger hysteria about the fact that large-scale voter vote drives inevitably lead to some errors. The rhetoric notwithstanding, registration "fraud" is very different from vote fraud, and in fact the former is extremely unlikely to lead to non-negligible amounts of the latter. Even if somehow the fake names get through and are registered to vote it doesn't actually matter in terms of the integrity of elections since "Mickey Mouse" and "Amanda Huggenkiss" and "Al Koholic" can't actually show up to vote because they don't exist. Until Glenn Reynolds et al. can actually find an example of "Foghorn Leghorn" actually being permitted to vote, this is a trivial issue that certainly doesn't constitute "vote fraud."
As Matt says if for some reason it was critically important for virtually every single name collected in mass voter registration drives to be accurate, there's an obvious solution in effect in many other liberal democracies: have professionals trained by the government be responsible for ensuring that citizens are registered. Of course, we're not going to hear about that remedy from people frothing at the mouth about ACORN because the point isn't to make registration a perfect process, but rather to use inevitable errors as a pretext to suppress legitimate voters. Since the Supreme Court has declared that you can do this even if there's literally no evidence that anyone in the state has fraudulently voted based on an erroneous registration, this is going to get worse before it gets better.
--Scott Lemieux
