Wrote Columbia law professor Nathaniel Persily about new state voter ID laws:
The greatest irony of the new crop of voter ID laws is that they do nothing to combat the more frequent problem of absentee ballot fraud.In fact, they might even make such fraud more likely because the number of absentee voters might increase, given that absentee voters do not need to have a photo ID in order to vote. Worse still, absentee votes are much more likely to be otherwise disqualified because of errors committed by either the voter or the vote counter. They present the perfect storm of fraud and mistakes that conjures up images of the cockeyed Florida vote counters in the 2000 election. [...]This will all be done in the name of preventing voter fraud. Yet if these laws lead unwittingly to an increase in the number of voters casting absentee votes out of public view, then they will not even have addressed the fraud they intend to solve. Indeed, they might even make it worse.
By Nathaniel Persily
August 31, 2012 | CNN
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