Actually, the real problem that voter-ID legislation is meant to solve is that poor people and the elderly - who are 11 percent less likely than other eligible voters to possess such identification - are known to vote overwhelming for Democrats.
Supporters of the bill have presented no credible evidence of a problem that would be worth spending $10 billion, the estimated cost of enforcing the law, to fix.
Testimony by the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania - which includes both Republicans and Democrats - said it could find no evidence from case records or anecdotal information from the counties that there is any problem at all. A report by New York University, which has studied this issue on a national level for years, puts it this way: "It is more likely than an individual would be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."
Voter fraud simply is not a realistic way to win an election. To pull it off, you would have to find out the names and voting places of legal voters - people you could be sure would not show up at the polls - and coach the impostors to impersonate them. And you would have to do it thousands of times. You get much more return on investment of time and effort by registering new legal voters, especially people who don't vote regularly, and then making sure they get to the polls. Not so coincidentally, the proposed voter-identification law would make that strategy more difficult to pursue.
