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As an aside, I'd note that to some people on the forum, the motive is a perfectly reasonable reason to dismiss. See "arguments as soldiers" and "atheist quotes the bible to Christian" discussions.
But I don't think that's the central point anyway. We do regularly argue the object of voter ID.
We do in fact look for voter fraud and that's how we've find out that a small number of people have tried to commit it and gotten caught.
The amount we've found is so infinitesimal that the upside to implementing voter ID is nil, not even counting whether voter ID would have changed anything. Even if "the real number may be higher," the reason people don't care is that unless you had post-hoc knowledge of swing districts, the real number would have to be tens or hundreds of thousands of times higher than estimated (and towards the same candidate) to actually change the outcome of any major election.
That implementing it to make people "feel" that the election is more secure is pointless, because the real root is usually sour grapes that their candidate didn't win. They'll just move the goalposts to claiming mail-in ballot fraud or such. Security theater is stupid.
That voter fraud is already a low salience crime, because there's no personal benefit and you'd have to do it at a massive scale to accomplish anything. Even if you think "no one checks," don't you think that if you try to cast 100+ fake votes that the odds of getting caught would go way up just because someone recognizes you or for some other trivial reason?
That the motive of its proponents does matter at an object level if they say they are going to do A and turn around and do B. Which I argue they have done and will likely do again.
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