Republicans shouldn't be locking out people who are eligible to vote, but at the same time Democrats shouldn't be enabling the submission of fraudulent ballots (ineligible, dead persons, etc), which common sense says is easier if you don't require ID verification at polls or if you allow mail-in ballots for all.
Both are anti-democratic.
That's just false. In what universe does fraud not have an impact on anything it touches, much less voting?
I can point to many occasions when voter fraud had an impact on outcomes (but was caught so it did not in the end). But the problem with this is that voter fraud is only heard about when it fails. You obviously have no idea how much actually successful fraud has occurred. This is generally true for all crimes, except voter fraud is an actual victimless crime (at least in terms of the victim being able to know that a crime was perpetrated against them), so you can't even estimate scale by victim reports like you could with something like assault or robbery.
my understanding is that fraud on elections is close to nil. So while OP is slightly hyperbolic, it isn't far off
Not a lot.
Regardless, the main point still applies. That's only the fraud we know about. The amount of fraud we don't know about that people are getting away with is an unbounded number that we literally can't even estimate given the nature of the crime. Again, this isn't identity theft or robbery where there is a clear victim to tell you "hey a crime has been committed against me" even if you never catch the perp. In the case of voter fraud, there will never be a smoking gun if you don't catch them first.
Regardless, it's fairly obvious that less ID verification / policies that result in less of an audit trail make fraud easier to execute without getting caught.
Followed the link on an oregon one.
“At the time of the election, (Robbins) was suffering from kidney infections which impacted his cognition,” said Oregon Department of Justice spokeswoman Kristina Edmunson. “He does not remember voting two ballots, but acknowledges that he did and is extremely remorseful.”
There's no evidence of even minor amounts of voting fraud, the current administration spent months on a commission to find the claimed millions of fraudulent votes and came up with nothing to my recollection. In fact the biggest cases I saw that came out recently was a Republican operative in North Carolina packing mail-in ballots... and he was caught without voter ID.
One is actively anti-democratic, the other is hypothetically anti-democratic. You're trying to both sides a possibility against actually anti-democratic actions and policies.
If any of the voter ID attempts came with real attempts to increase voter turn out and make sure everyone had an ID I might give them the benefit of the doubt but it never does and the only side that wants it fights tooth and nail to make it harder for voters to vote.
It's the Republicans that want voter ID and the Democrats that want to get rid of it.
And yet you're telling me that it's all just Republicans looking out for their own interests / voter suppression? Ok...
Points I have made:
1. Voter fraud exists (true)
2. Republicans support policies that based on common-sense (and actual examples) reduce fraud
Thank you for helping me make my argument.
And again, it takes two to tango. Why can't the Democrats run with voter ID and encourage people to vote / make it easy for everyone eligible to get an ID? Instead they say "no voter ID ever, it's always voter suppression!"
The problem with voter fraud is that it's obviously hard to detect at scale if it actually works. Unlike other crimes, there is no victim that you can use to count cases.