> The impact of actual fraud on elections is nil

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.