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Recent bickering over who should require what to vote where have suggested that requiring a person bring some form of ID to the poll might help alleviate fraud. This makes important assumptions:

  1. Requiring ID's from voters will make a difference in the rate of fraudulent votes.
  2. The difference in the rate of fraudulence is significant enough to matter in elections.

My guess is that both make a difference, but I am only guessing, I don't have any statistics to back this up.

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    Are you already aware that the rate of in-person voter fraud is so low as to be insignificant? Aug 10, 2012 at 2:52
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    @Chad Would you like to give details on these "areas of relatively high fraud"? Aug 13, 2012 at 13:36
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    @IgnatiusTheophorus Yes, the number of voter impersonation frauds is much, much less than .006%. It's around one in a million. In some states the courts have shown it to be zero Aug 13, 2012 at 13:49
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    @Chad Can you post a reference to back up that allegation, please. This is a Skeptics site. And if you could show that this '>100% turnout' was due to voter ID fraud that would be good too. Aug 13, 2012 at 18:56
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    @DJClayworth: What was stipulated was that that the party defending the new voter ID law had no particular evidence of fraud having taken place. That is not the same thing as saying that no fraud occurred. If elected officials are going to be be given power over the someone, I do not think it unreasonable that the person be entitled to evidence that fraud could not have been committed without a high likelihood of detection and without the perpetrators facing significant personal risk.
    – supercat
    Sep 28, 2014 at 18:46

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Suggested reading: The Truth About Voter Fraud by Justin Levitt (2007, PDF, 303 KB) at the Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law. He cites numerous cases of alleged voter fraud that were too insignificant to make a difference in the elections or could not have been prevented by screening voters based on their photo ID (e.g. vote-buying, which rigs the election with the help of valid, eligible voters).

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    Can you expand this with excerpts, cases, references?
    – Sklivvz
    Aug 10, 2012 at 20:28

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