No. of Recommendations: 13
Why are you concerned with finding out what the number is?
Because the right to vote is important. And to point out why your assumption that Democrats support fraud is wrong.
It is exceedingly unlikely that any large number of people have engaged in in-person voting fraud that could be detected by voter ID (which is basically impersonating a registered voter). There are records of exactly who voted in each election, those records are fairly comprehensive, and several efforts have been made to parse those records to try to find people voting fraudulently. Those efforts always fail to find any of the type of voter fraud that voter ID could protect against - sometimes to very embarrassing effect, like with Tucker Carlson's investigation. Any of that specific voter fraud that was large enough to ever matter would be large enough to detect, after the fact. Since no one is ever able to find it, we know that a miniscule number of such instances exist.
Meanwhile, we know there are millions of people who don't have the type of governmental ID that is required by most of these voting measures. We know this because unlike the above example, each time we survey the population we find about 10% of the population (give or take) doesn't have that ID.
These types of proposals always require balancing two separate sets of interests - enabling citizens to lawfully vote and preventing non-citizens from fraudulently voting. It's not one or the other. It's one thing to say (correctly and everyone agrees with this) that no one should be allowed to fraudulently vote, but the flip side to that is that any measure that imposes conditions or restrictions on voting or registering will end up not just filtering out the fraudsters but also prevent citizens from voting.
So here's the thing - it's almost certain that the number of people who lack ID is orders of magnitude higher than the number of people fraudulently voting. So you erode the integrity of elections more when you kick all those legal people out of the polling place and block their ballots in order to keep out the small handful of ballots (if even that much) cast by the fraudsters.
Which is why it's wrong when you claim that Democrats are motivated by a desire for fraud in elections (or whatever the terminology was above). Democrats are motivated by what happens to the people without ID, not what happens to the people who try to fraudulently vote in person, because they are aware that the former population is at least 1000X larger than the latter. Even if you think that motivation is purely self-interested and driven by a desire for power, rather than protecting the interests of the voter, it's still the much much larger number. The fraudulent votes (if any exist) are too small to matter, but the people being blocked from voting is large enough to matter - so that's what motivates Democrats.
Now then - Democrats also believe that Republicans also know this. That Republicans know that the number of legal people being blocked is orders of magnitude higher than the number of fraudulent people that will be filtered out, and that the real impact on the elections will be driven exclusively by eliminating legal voters rather than blocking illegal ones.
But even if you don't believe that Democrats are correct in believing this, it is still what they believe. They believe that requiring voter ID will have virtually zero impact on blocking fraudulent votes, but have a very large impact on blocking legal votes. And that is why they oppose it. Because the legal number is much much larger than the illegal number.
Which is why I asked you that question. And am curious what your answer is.
