<sigh> No, I'm not trying to argue that there are no voter records. I'm trying to argue that IF someone does not vote, and IF someone else knows that (and both parties keep registration records) and votes as him, the only way you'd catch the illegal vote is if the person who habitually does not vote suddenly decided to vote, therefore logging two votes for that person.
So you are alleging a conspiracy in which parties hire individuals to comb voter registration records for infrequent voters in order to send out individuals who will risk a felony at every polling station for each additional vote? Do you realize how ridiculous this conspiracy theory is? If you want to commit organized voter fraud this is about the worst way imaginable. This is simply not a credible theory as it would be a total waste of money, time, and effort.
Furthermore, voting patterns are not that static. People frequently go years without voting and then start again. You would most certainly encounter significant numbers of double votes even with an attempt to target only infrequent voters who have decided to register anyway.
Another potential type of fraud is when a person is made up, either completely or in the listed place. A high percentage of same day registration packets typically come back undeliverable. One of the big problems I had with the Brennan Center study is that unless it definitely found someone voting twice, or someone voting who is not eligible, they assumed the vote was legitimate. If the person who registered cannot be found at the address given just a few weeks earlier, my assumption is just the opposite - that this person is not a legitimate voter.
There is obviously the same problem with absentee voting, and I'm certainly up for changing absentee voting to require early in-person voting with ID.
They didn't assume the vote was legitimate, they just didn't use that as evidence of voter fraud due to the multiplicity of factors that could contribute to such a thing. It would be impossible to use such a grey area as actual evidence. They concentrated on areas that were concrete, provable facts. If in-person voter fraud were actually occurring on a large scale, they should have gotten plenty of hits from it. They didn't.
This is partisan political election engineering, period.
Just as with the Brennan Center's project to "fix" democracy by ending the filibuster, we see that their interest is not nearly so much in empowering democracy as in empowering Democrats.
I attempted to fit in a situation analogous to the above example using an observed theft, an occasional occurrence that results in the thief being caught. But really, any posited mechanism that results in an occasional bust will do.[/QUOTE]
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