i.e. 'Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done'
Now, in that particular case, the state (I believe it was Colorado though I'd have to find the article I read, and I don't remember where to find it any more) didn't require photo ID, so there was no way to prove that the people showing up on Election Day were the actual voters, as opposed to the cheaters. But this poll watcher's opinion was that they were the actual voters, and the cheating had been done by whoever had submitted ballots in their name days (or weeks) earlier. Given how many people she said this had happened to, I'm inclined to agree with her: it wasn't three or four people, it was (she said) something like one-third of the people who showed up on Election Day at that polling place.
That's a case where the fraud couldn't be repaired by knowing that it had occurred — the fraudulent ballots (if they were indeed fraudulent) had already been accepted, and it was impossible to go pull the ballot allegedly belonging to Joe Smith back out of the ballot box. But the publicly-available list of "who voted" did at least make it possible for the fraud to be detected in that particular case.
I personally do support voter ID, and for the same reason. Members of the public must be able to verify the process is happening fairly. It might be fair without it (fraud truly negligible), but it must also be seen to be fair. This would resolve so many controversies.
Likewise mandatory voting and private ballots (can cast a donkey vote) helps ensure the public people are not being paid to vote and that other biases are not coming into play.
My personal opinion is that if people think they can benefit from cheating, a certain number will do so. It's just human nature. We're seeing more and more of this with LLM cheating on the rise in universities. So there's always going to be a certain number of people who want to vote fraudulently — after all, if the right person gets into office, it'll probably benefit you. Your taxes might be lowered, or your government handouts might be increased, or whatever other reason you have for preferring one politician over another. Preference alone does not mean that people will vote fraudulently: after all, most legitimate voters also prefer one politician over another. But the easier you make it to cheat, the more people will cheat successfully: among those who wanted to cheat but didn't, usually the only reason they didn't is because they couldn't see how to get away with it.
So photo ID to vote just seemed like common sense to me, along with other measures like ballot boxes kept in a publicly-visible place until they're opened, to help prove that nobody has tampered with them. (Read up on the 1946 elections in Athens, TN sometime — there, the fraud was being done by the sheriff and his cronies who would take the ballot boxes away, "count" them in private with no outside observers present, and announce that surprise surprise, the sheriff's crony had won the election again).
In the last general election 16,000 people were prevented from voting because they didn't have the correct ID - despite there being mechanisms for them to get suitable ID for free ahead of an election.
Sometimes the fix is worse than the actual problem you're trying to solve.
Also, without a photo ID the fraud rate is near impossible to measure - people can just sell their votes to imposters, fabricate voters, etc. It would be undetectable in your stats. A similar concern applies to postal votes, and there have been high profile cases of this in the UK.
As a concrete example The Tower Hamlets Scandal saw Luftur Raham's election declared null 'on the grounds of corrupt and illegal practices by him and his agents, and general corruption so extensively prevailing so to reasonably supposed to have affected the election' despite a similar number of low hundreds of allegations of fraud. That's a proven-in-court example showing you are wrong to dismiss the concern based on the data. The methods used are clearly not detectable by the system you endorse, and that system has demonstrably lead to the unjust disenfranchisement of your fellow countrymen.
That is why I like voter ID if it relies on documents provided for free with minimal fuss.
However, every US state I'm aware of (if you know of exceptions, please let me know) has some form of photo ID you can obtain for free. Usually it's in the same format as a driver's license, and obtained from the same place (the Department of Motor Vehicles, Department of Land Transportation, the name varies). There's a fee to obtain a driver's license, but a photo ID card (in the same format as a driver's license but marked "NOT LEGAL FOR DRIVING" or similar wording) can be obtained for free, by going through the same process as getting a driver's license (bring something to prove your identity, get your photo taken, wait for the card to be printed) but without taking a driving-skills test.
And before someone asks "what about the people who can't prove their identity"? Well, I can actually give an anecdote. I know someone who ended up in that situation: away from home for college, couldn't get her birth certificate or anything else, and needing to replace her passport that was lost. (She is American but had grown up overseas because of her parents' job, hence why she had a passport but no driver's license when she went off to college). She had quite a time of it at first, since every "prove your identity" requirement circled back around to another form of ID. But she was eventually able to get a fishing license just by swearing under penalty of perjury that she was indeed (name). With that in hand, she got another form of ID (I think a library card, though there my memory is iffy), then with two forms of ID she could get something else, and then eventually she was able to get that non-driver's ID card... and then was able to prove who she was to get her lost passport reissued.
That all happened nearly 30 years ago so I can't swear to the details. But the point is, photo ID cards are widely available, and it's normal to be asked for one. So as long as the law specifies that acceptable forms of photo ID include X, Y, and Z (where X, Y and Z are forms that most people would already have, and that are normal and in common use), and as long as at least one of those forms can be obtained without a fee (which as I said, is true in all U.S. states that I'm aware of, please mention any exceptions you know about because I'd like to know) then it will pass Constitutional muster.
And you have some memory of some account from someone 12 years ago in a state you can't remember saying that a third of voters had someone pretend to be them?
If this were close to true, it wouldn't be some blog post that you can't remember; it would have been a national scandal and it would have been something that we would never forget because the election stealer conspiracy theorists would never let it go.
Really, you should just delete this post as it's irresponsible and lacks any data.
The idea that if we had paper ballots with walk-in only, ID-verified votes, that Trump and Fox News et al wouldn't have launched a coup attempt, or wouldn't have gotten nearly as far, is pretty laughable. In fact we have Trump on the record saying as much: "It doesn't matter whether you win or lose, you have to fight like hell."
Let's take your scenario. In fact there is a way to verify which vote was correct (and it's used already) which is to match the signatures between the voter registration and the ballot.
This is sufficient except in cases where the registration itself was fraudulent, which would have required 1) having someone's ID at time of registration and 2) intercepting the mail sent to their ID- or utility-bill-confirmed mailing address.
An attacker who could achieve that could also have achieved just walking into the polling place to achieve the same false vote.
Any attack is extremely expensive to do at any meaningful scale, and all scaled attacks are detectable by simple statistical sampling.
If meaningful amounts of tampering were detected by statistical sampling then you can obviously re-run elections with tighter controls, more burden, lower turnout, and a generally-less-representative result, which is why we start with a more inclusive system. This can and does actually happen. Whether it's necessary is literally 100% statistically knowable through basic sampling.
But you did that by making a big, surprising claim for which you haven't provided any evidence. You might not intend for that to be the main thing people focus on, but they are right to be both interested and skeptical! If true, it's a big deal.
The closest thing I could find is this (https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/voters-predominant...), which was attributed to 'human error' rather than fraud, and was resolved by allowing the affected voters to cast provisional ballots. 'Human error' is a vague explanation, and for all I know it was a coverup -- but the onus is on you to provide some positive reason to believe that. Surely there were plenty of people motivated to investigate this, so it would be surprising if a bullshit explanation was just quietly accepted and no further public attention paid.
Not sure why your OG post is still up.
Voter ID solves a non-existent fraud problem and does so by making voting harder.
Quite a few husbands believe they should have control over their wives' votes. I guess you'd say they should have the courage to leave them and wreck their children's lives and be ostracized by their family and community?
And it's not hard to imagine certain employers having a strong opinion on how you vote on specific measures. Of course they couldn't compel anyone to reveal their votes, but it could be made customary enough that refusing to would be enough of a signal. I guess you'd need the courage to quit and take a lower paying job?
As for what happens in marriages or other social settings, yes, wives can coerce their husbands, fathers can coerce their adult daughters, friends can coerce one another. If your counterpart is the kind of person who would threaten to blow up your relationship over how you vote, yes, I would suggest maybe that tells you something about who they are and whether or not you want them in your life. But if the relationship means that much to you, you can always go along to get along and let them tell you how to vote. I think that says something about how much you value your vote though. And at the societal level, I don’t think this would have a meaningful impact on governance
I don't think they can be dealt with. But I'm willing to listen to your ideas. How would you deal with vote buying? How would you stop the scenario where a guy says "I'll give you $1,000 if you vote for candidate X" (or "I know where you live, I'll break your kneecaps if you vote for candidate Y")?