Voter Fraud vs. Voter Suppression

There's a lot of talk lately about voter ID laws. Like many things, this issue has devolved into two sides. One side says that these laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud. The other side says these laws disenfranchise legitimate voters.

I'm not going to get into each side accusing the other of having negative motives. That's just not productive.

Let's instead start with basic premises of democracy, and identify our common ground. In a perfect system, no legitimate voter would be prevented from voting, and no illegitimate voter would be allowed to vote. This applies regardless of political persuasion, race, religion, location, age, anything. The goal is to have a good election, even if it results in your side losing.

(If you don't agree with that, I suggest you go live in Iran, which you might find more to your liking.)

Now that we've identified the ideal, we have to acknowledge that we don't live in a perfect world. Some number of fraudulent votes will be cast, and and some number of legitimate voters will be turned away. We wish to minimize both these numbers. But what if we have to decide between them?

That's what these voter ID laws ask us to do. So instead of arguing about hypothetical models, let's talk about what can be quantified.

These laws will prevent some number of fraudulent votes (and before someone accuses me of taking sides, zero is a number). These laws will also suppress some number of legitimate votes. We can measure both those things and see what effect the laws have.

But before we do that, let's define a standard. Having a standard, then comparing evidence against our standard, gives us a path to admit we were wrong, and thus become right. Again, let's try to find common ground.

Say we wanted to avoid even a single case of voter suppression, but as a consequence we had to accept ten billion fraudulent votes. This is a bad trade, because the ten billion fraudulent votes now dictate the course of the election. The one vote we "saved" didn't matter at all.

Now the other side. Say we wanted to prevent one fraudulent vote, and to do so we had to suppress every other vote in the country. I think we'd all agree that was a bad trade. Sure, there are no fraudulent votes, but there's also no election.

These absurd extremes demonstrate that we all live somewhere in the middle, and that we can (at least in principle) put a number on this problem. The only real difference any of us have is exactly where between these extremes we draw our line. So ask yourself: how many fraudulent votes have to be prevented to be worth suppressing one legitimate vote? The one suppressed voter loses his voice entirely; the one or five or fifty fraudulent voters reduces the value of everyone's vote. Where's the balance point?

I'm pretty confident that if you have to suppress more than one vote to prevent one fraudulent vote, we're definitely in the wrong territory. One fraudulent vote does less damage to the election than one suppressed vote does.

I'm also pretty confident that if you allow more fraudulent votes than the margin of error in the election, you're ruining the integrity of the election for all involved. So that puts a hard upper bound on the number of fraudulent votes that should be allowed in the entire election.

In between those numbers, things get a little fuzzy. I could see easy arguments for any ratio between 1:1 and 1:10, and I'd like to hear arguments for numbers outside that. So we have our standard. Now we ask, how do the numbers work out? Because if more votes are being suppressed than frauds are being prevented, we've created more problems than we've solved.

Let the data gathering commence!