Luckily, JB Van Hollen conducted precisely that kind of investigation into the 2008 election (see http://badgerherald.com/news/2011/02/01/doj_task_force_charg.php), where 20 cases of fraud were found, zero of which would have been prevented by photo ID. Another investigation into the 2004 election found 7 cases of fraud, zero of which would have been prevented by photo ID. That doesn't mean voter fraud by impersonation never happens, but it does mean that it happens at sufficiently low levels to not leave a trail of convictions.

I'll tell you what would make me feel enormously better about voting integrity: randomly selecting a sample of voting machines (perhaps 100) each election and doing a hand-count of the ballots put through them to verify the results. Since estimates of the cost of last year's SC race recount were circa $1m, counting about 2% of machine-passed ballots should be just a few tens of thousands statewide. More for ballots with multiple races, so somewhere in the region of $100k-200k every other year shouldn't be wildly wrong. This would make it virtually impossible to influence a statewide election through subverted voting machine code (which currently has a far higher reward/risk ratio than trying to vote multiple times yourself) without being caught, and is far cheaper to implement than photo ID (which runs over $3m each year).

Note I'm not saying here that photo ID is bad (that's a different discussion); I am saying that there are far lower-hanging fruit to pick when it comes to election integrity.

@Jim -

Afraid they're going to trace some fraud back to you? Why not conduct a thorough investigation. It will either expose fraud or vindicate that argument. What do we have to lose by checking things out to make sure everything was conducted on the up and up?

BTW - Van hasn't represented the City of Racine since August 23, 2011, so who cares if the City of Racine doesn't like him. The only reason they were permitted to participate in his recall is because of a faulty and inequitable drafting and passage of Act 43, and the fact that Senate Democrats and Sen Dale Schultz (R), fearing his own recall at the time, failed to back Sen Lazich's amendment that would have rectified this situation before the recalls had even been filed, instead choosing their own partisan and personal political interests above the equity of the affected people in the new districts.

Van's been representing the new SD-21 and Wirch has been representing a majority of the City of Racine (now a part of the new SD-22) since August 24, 2011. So essentially, this recall allowed the City of Racine to recall Van even though he didn't even represent it since before the recall was even initiated on November 15, 2011. Do you think that's fair?

Your "No jobs Snotty" isn`t to good at creating jobs either.

@Richard: So: (a) you're privy to some evidence that the DA is not - I suggest you hand it over to their office since withholding it could land you in deep legal trouble; and (b) Lehman forgot to steal the votes for Barrett while he was at it too.