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You are ignoring Hawaii with a 115 vote difference in 1960. With your suggested productivity per fraudster, that would require 3 people (15 minutes per vote, 12 hours) for a single day of voting. 1 person with early voting, who can take it very easy. And it regularly happens that a margin of less than 10k decides the election. That would require 28 people when using your calculation, with early voting.
Note that you are ignoring senatorial and local elections, which add up to a lot more chances for a close contest.
And voting integrity laws are often at least as much about the perception of security, both on the part of potential fraudsters and the voting public, as they are about actually preventing fraud. And I do observe that the reputation of voting without ID has a reputation of making fraud easy.
In polling, 25% of some broad groups approve of using violence for political ends: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll
I'm sure that if you zoom in, you could find groups with way higher approval ratings than that (antifa, proud boys, etc).
Surely you would agree that fraud is generally considered less morally wrong than violence? And your entire premise is flawed anyway. To get people to commit fraud, you would logically convince them that their fraud is justified, or not even fraud. Like how doping athletes tend to justify it by: 'everyone does it, so I'm just leveling the playing field.' Every election there are a lot of people who believe in fraud anyway, on both sides.
And woke people already justify racial and gender discrimination by claiming that it is just a correction for discrimination happening the other way. Even to the point where they simply deny that discrimination is even possible in one direction, no matter how similar it is to what they would call discrimination with the genders/races swapped. So if they just apply the same logic to voting fraud...
According to your link, the software is (also) used to identify people "who were eligible to cast ballots but were not registered to vote." But this is publicly available information and registering presumably doesn't require an ID check either in any states without Voter ID. So all it takes to create a list of exploitable people is to get a list of residents of a state (easy to get from data brokers) and then check whether they are registered. Then the fraudster can recheck the list in the voter registry just before the deadline, and then quickly register these people to vote, and vote in their name.
Normally, only 10-20% of the people who get mailings from ERIC actually go register to vote, but what percentage would register just before the deadline or vote despite thinking that they are not registered? Surely that would cut the risk down of the person then actually voting as well to a fraction of a percent. Then to detect this fraud (in total), a lot of other things would have to work out. It would have to be detected as fraud, the fraudster would have to be caught, and then this person would also have to admit to the entire scheme. If there is a conspiracy, the schemers would of course come up with a cover story and instructions to only talk with a lawyer present that preferably is part of the conspiracy.
Except that there is an obvious purpose, to increase trust in the system.
Yet on the other hand, you just acknowledged that ERIC is used to contact voters on what they need to do to vote. So that serves a very similar purpose to canvassing, and is not limited to rural areas. So why is the question not whether voters all get the needed information to make sure that they can get an ID in any (valid) circumstance?
Presumably this was a study that looked at the effect directly after implementing such a law? Did Democratic canvassers include information about IDs in their canvassing efforts?
I'm not ignoring it, I'm treating it as a freak occurrence. It's the closest state in the closest election in the last 80 years. That's the platonic ideal of cherry picking. I copied the chart into Excel and took the average, and the average is 56,514 (median is 28,713) of a data set already filtering for the closest elections.
I notice that you neglect responding to the part where the fraudsters don't have to cast only 115 votes. They have no idea at the time they're doing it how many they need.
I focused on the Presidential election because:
A) it's where we have the most data
B) it's what most of the people talk about, like Trump is still out here claiming he won in 2020.
C) It makes the topic even more unwieldy to discuss.
I've seen that poll before and I think the question is shit. I would say yes to "political violence can sometimes be justified?" because I'd consider a hypothetical random civilian who tried to assassinate literal, actual Hitler a hero. The question didn't ask what my limit would be.
Two problems with this. First of all, doping is a crime you perform in private. Pretending to be someone else you do in public.
Second of all, the limiting factor of conspiracy is not finding like-minded individuals. It's finding like-minded individuals without failing to recruit someone and that someone tipping off authorities.
Who is our modal fraudster anyway? To figure out who is eligible to vote you need their name and some other detail, usually birthday or partial SSN. You're talking about getting data from data brokers, but they're using it to just wander around a city casting votes in person? It's like assembling Ocean's Eleven to rob a liquor store. If you are smart enough to try to farm citizens to impersonate, I'd think you'd be smart enough to come up with a better plan than this. I think every person we have prosecuted for voter fraud at the polls was just trying to impersonate a single relative.
The lack of trust in the system is not the problem of the system. It's a problem of people distrusting the system. To put it bluntly, to the Democratic party places a very low importance on this benefit, and doubts they can earn it even by following instructions. Georgia was a big part of Trump's 2020 claims of election fraud, and Georgia already requires photo ID.
If anything, it increases distrust in the system because it just opens the doors to further claims of fraud seeming plausible. Trump has just tried to restrict mail-in voting, which I predicted Republicans would do.
I wouldn't be opposed to voters being given more info, but it doesn't remove my complaint that voter ID is a waste of time. But not all states use ERIC, and Republicans are the ones who seem to want to leave the program.
Yes, this was a government analysis done in 2014 covering the change in turnout in states before and after voter ID. It's mentioned right in that general section.
From the page right after it, it was too soon to examine the effects. But I still object to putting everything on canvassers to fix the problem. Part of voter ID isn't just "whether voters need to provide some proof vs none at all." It's that Republicans change the laws to arbitrarily reject perfectly valid ways to identify people.
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