Months ago, we stand outside one of the local grocery stores. We reach into a large bin made of corrugated cardboard and sort through the different pumpkins. We each have different criteria for our selection as we look through the large collection of these orange masses. Many years ago, my wife introduced me to the activity of carving pumpkins, one in which she insists that I have artistic ability. Meanwhile, we put our selections in the cart, go inside to pay for them, and load them into the car.
These large bins are outside the store. Certainly, there’s absolutely nothing that prevents anyone from simply taking pumpkins home without paying for them. Can they steal them? Yes, absolutely. Do they steal them? No, they generally don’t. While I’m sure that some steal these pumpkins that sit outside the store, it’s not a big enough problem where they are compelled to address it.
I’m sure that the store has a good idea of how many pumpkins there are in the bin. Furthermore, they know how many pumpkins are sold. At some point they had done the math and calculated what is an acceptable number of thefts. Taking into account the added space that they need to set aside inside the store and the natural cooling you’d get from the fall weather that would keep the pumpkins from spoiling, they concluded that simply keeping them outside is just easier and better. The number of thefts simply doesn’t offset the problems that would arise from any solutions.
Requiring photo id disproportionately impacts minorities
Initially, the idea of requiring a photo id to vote made sense, much like bringing the pumpkins inside the store. However, as I learned more about voting rights, I came upon this page in the ACLU’s website about voter photo id. This stat stuck with me:
Minority voters disproportionately lack ID. Nationally, up to 25% of African-American citizens of voting age lack government-issued photo ID, compared to only 8% of whites.
Upon my simply quoting this stat, I got many angry responses, a number where they asserted that this was racist. Do I believe that minority voters are perfectly capable of getting an id? Absolutely, I simply don’t think that we can disproportionately subject them to more obstacles to vote than other voters and maintain that it’s fair.
Many insisted that this was absurd because you can’t even function in society without an id. I’ll concede that you need an id for many tasks, if you concede that many legitimate ids are not accepted to vote. For instance, a certificate of naturalization establishes both your identity and your citizenship. Why is it not universally accepted to vote?
I don’t necessarily object to voting photo id per se, I simply believe that we need to close the gap between 92% and 75%.
“Back of the envelope” math about voting
Some will continue to scream “integrity of the vote”. They’ll assert that we need to know that the person casting that vote is precisely who they claim; that’s why we need photo id upon voting. Let’s do the math. Take the numbers from the last presidential election and assume that we can drive the vast majority of those voters to get a photo id. We’ll use an absurdly high percentage, like 99.99% (remember, even for white voters, it’s currently at 92%). This means that 0.01% of those voters will still be ineligible to vote:
(81,284,666 (Biden) + 74,224,319 (Trump)) x 0.0001 = 15550.8985 voters ineligible to vote.
This basically means that we’ll exclude 1 in every 10,000 people. This could be due to a number of reasons: their license expired, they forgot it at home, etc. I’m not doing fancy math here; it’s just arithmetic. Even if we go door-to-door and give a free photo id to 99.99% of all eligible voters, which we can agree is an absurdly high aspiration, that still means that we’re throwing away over 15k votes.
Here’s the problem, I acknowledge that we would like to know that every vote is coming from precisely who they claim. However, the spirit of the integrity of the vote must also include the notion that everyone who wants to vote should get to vote.
Here are 15550 people who won’t.
“We must address all the illegal voting”
What illegal voting? I concede that this number is not zero, but there’s simply no reason to believe that there was widespread voter fraud. I realize that some sore losers will allege it, but there’s simply no evidence to suggest it, for instance:
- Christopher Krebs (GOP), the head of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, declared the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
- William Barr (GOP), Attorney General, declared that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election that would’ve changed the outcome.
- There were about 60 lawsuits launched about the 2020 presidential election, the vast majority of them were lost or dismissed.
- Even with the fiasco in Arizona with the Cyber Ninjas, there was no change in the results of that election.
You could make the case that they don’t want to find cases of voter fraud. However, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick put up a bounty of up to one million dollars for proven cases of voter fraud, he paid it out precisely once. That one case was a vote for Trump.
If there is voter fraud, it’s pretty well hidden, since even people looking to cash in on one million dollars couldn’t find it.
Let’s look at the actual proven cases of election fraud. There have been 1350 cases of voter fraud, since 1980. That’s fewer than one per state per year. That number spanning the four-year period that spans a presidential election is 129 proven cases of voter fraud: that’s total. While I understand that the number of actual voting fraud is higher than the proven cases of voting fraud, how much higher does the rate need to be?
That means that the actual fraud rate needs to be one hundred twenty-one times the proven rate. That is 12,095% the documented rate.
That’s the rate for 99.99% voter id, what about the actual rates?
Those are the numbers for the wildly optimistic rate of 99.99%. What could the actual numbers be? The ACLU quotes a study that “found that strict photo ID laws reduce turnout by 2-3 percentage points”. What would that be?
Estimated eliminated voters: 155,508,985 x 0.02 = 3,110,179.7 votes
We take 2% of the number that voted in the last presidential election. The most conservative estimate is 3.1 million votes lost. To put in perspective:
- In order to justify throwing out these many votes, the rate of actual voter fraud would have to be 24,109 times the proven voter fraud rate (or 2,410,992%). No, that’s not a typo.
- That number of votes that we’d be excluding is higher than the population of 18 states.
Could we at least entertain the idea that the cure is worse than the poison? In fact, numerically it is 24,109 times worse than the poison.
What is the spirit of the integrity of the vote, when we establish regulation that effectively eliminates 3.1 million votes?
Why add the requirement for voter photo id at all?
If there is rampant voter fraud, then requiring a photo id would certainly minimize it. However, much like the pumpkins-at-the-store scenario at the beginning of the post. Just because someone can simply take a pumpkin without paying for it, doesn’t mean anyone actually did. Similarly, just because someone can submit a fraudulent vote, doesn’t mean anyone actually did.
Moreover, there’s simply no evidence that suggests that this has occurred. Even a one-million-dollar bounty did very little to uncover voter fraud; why do we believe that it’s a problem? Why would the party of ‘smaller government’, the one that aspires to abstain from needlessly adding more rules, attempt to pass a photo id requirement for voting?
Please excuse my skepticism, but is it plausible that they know about the 25% to 8% gap between black voters and white voters? Could this simply be a mechanical means to dilute the black vote? I mean there are similar proposed legislation that results in longer voting lines in urban areas in Texas, which disproportionately impact Democratic voters.
If we were to examine even the most optimistic estimates for excluding otherwise eligible voters, the actual rates of fraud would need to be several orders of magnitude worse that we have ever observed. Maybe the best approach is the same as the pumpkins at the grocery store, understanding that there will be some instances of dishonesty, but they are so rare that trying to prevent them is ultimately self-defeating.