The Tribune-Review Editorial Board Is Lying To You About Voter ID Fraud

In an editorial defending Voter ID laws, our good friends on the Tribune-Review editorial board have built an argument based in full on these two sentences:

Voter fraud is a fact. Disenfranchisement via voter IDs is not.

Both of which are demonstrably false.  Or at the very least, whatever fraud that the first sentence describes doesn't amount to enough fraud to swing any election.

From the Washington Post:

Almost no one shows up at the polls pretending to be someone else in an effort to throw an election. Almost no one acts as a poll worker on Election Day to try to cast illegal votes for a candidate. And almost no general election race in recent history has been close enough to have been thrown by the largest example of in-person voter fraud on record.

That said, there have been examples of fraud, including fraud perpetrated through the use of absentee ballots severe enough to force new elections at the state level. But the slew of new laws passed over the past few years meant to address voter fraud have overwhelmingly focused on the virtually non-existent/unproven type of voter fraud, and not the still-not-common-but-not-non-existent abuse of absentee voting.

In August, Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola University Law School, detailed for Wonkblog 31 instances of documented, in-person voter fraud that would have been prevented by stricter rules around identification at the polling place. The most severe instance Levitt outlined involved as many as 24 voters in Brooklyn who tried to vote under assumed names.

There are almost no elections in which 24 votes makes a significant difference, particularly at the federal level. [Emphasis and link in original.]

Did my friends in Scaife's braintrust forget about this?  The piece links to a description of some paperwork filed with the Pennsylvania court.  The description goes like this:

The state signed a stipulation agreement with lawyers for the plaintiffs which acknowledges there “have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states.”

So WHERE IS THE VOTER FRAUD??

And now for that second sentence, this is what happens when a Federal judge takes a look at a state Voter ID law:

In a decision that could have implications nationally and in Wisconsin's November elections, a federal judge on Tuesday struck down the state's voter ID law, saying it violated the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.

The law known as Act 23 had already been blocked by a state judge. For the law to be put back in place, supporters would have to overturn both the state and federal decisions — a possibility thatcould prove difficult between now and the Nov. 4 election for governor.

"There is no way to determine exactly how many people Act 23 will prevent or deter from voting without considering the individual circumstances of each of the 300,000 plus citizens who lack an ID," U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman wrote in his 70-page ruling. "But no matter how imprecise my estimate may be, it is absolutely clear that Act 23 will prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes."

To sum up: what little (if any) Voter ID Fraud that occurs, it's not enough to do much (if any) damage.  The laws enacted to "fight" Voter ID Fraud are designed to "prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent ones."

And, of course, those prevented though legitimate votes would probably have gone to the Democratic Party.

The Tribune-Review editorial board is lying to you about Voter ID Fraud.

Again.