In Pennsylvania there are an estimated three-quarters of a million people who have no state-issued ID cards, which have just been made a prerequisite for voting in that state. As you might imagine, this is having a huge effect on get-out-the-vote methods in the Keystone State.

The estimated 750,000 voters who do not have state-issued IDs in Pennsylvania surpasses President Obama’s margin of victory in 2008. Many of the voters without ID are in poor and minority communities — typically blocs that vote Democratic. Democrats’ worst fears appeared to be confirmed when the Republican leader of the state House, who helped shepherd the legislation onto the books, recently boasted that it will “allow” Mitt Romney win the Keystone State.

There are legal challenges to this law underway, but it’s uncertain whether judges will think the law is an obvious successor to poll taxes as a technique to limit voting to “the right people” and declare it unconstitutional.

These laws are a direct result of Republican screeching for years about vote fraud, which has never been shown to affect US elections in any major way, at least in the past 50 years. See the summaries of case studies starting on page 23 of this document, a report from the respected Brennan Center for Justice at NYU’s School of Law. In 2000 in Missouri an after-the-election study showed there were six potential cases of double voting:

There were 6 substantiated cases of Missouri votes cast by ineligible voters, knowingly or unknowingly, except for those votes permitted by court order. These six cases were double votes by four voters – two across
state lines and two within Missouri. This amounts to a rate of 0.0003%.

The other case studies show similarly small rates of voting irregularities.

Voting fraud is just one more example of the right-wing message machine overwhelming the truth by constant repetition.