The Nonexistant Problem

Voter fraud:

In a country of 300 million you'll find a bit of almost anything. But multiple studies taking different approaches have all come to the same conclusion: The rate of voter fraud in American elections is close to zero.
In her 2010 book, The Myth of Voter Fraud, Lorraine Minnite tracked down every single case brought by the Justice Department between 1996 and 2005 and found that the number of defendants had increased by roughly 1,000 percent under Ashcroft. But that only represents an increase from about six defendants per year to 60, and only a fraction of those were ever convicted of anything. A New York Times investigation in 2007 concluded that only 86 people had been convicted of voter fraud during the previous five years. Many of those appear to have simply made mistakes on registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, and more than 30 of the rest were penny-ante vote-buying schemes in local races for judge or sheriff. The investigation found virtually no evidence of any organized efforts to skew elections at the federal level.
Another set of studies has examined the claims of activist groups like Thor Hearne's American Center for Voting Rights, which released a report in 2005 citing more than 100 cases involving nearly 300,000 allegedly fraudulent votes during the 2004 election cycle. The charges involved sensational-sounding allegations of double-voting, fraudulent addresses, and voting by felons and noncitizens. But in virtually every case they dissolved upon investigation. Some of them were just flatly false, and others were the result of clerical errors. Minnite painstakingly investigated each of the center's charges individually and found only 185 votes that were even potentially fraudulent.
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has focused on voter fraud issues for years. In a 2007 report they concluded that "by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare." In the Missouri election of 2000 that got Sen. Bond so worked up, the Center found a grand total of four cases of people voting twice, out of more than 2 million ballots cast. In the end, the verified fraud rate was 0.0003 percent.

If you listened to them, Republicans are opposed to the passage of pointless laws.  Their definition of pointless laws are environmental, safety and consumer protection laws.  You know, who needs less polluted air or water, the elimination of preventable injuries and deaths or laws limiting financial fraud and usury?  But, damn it, if old, poor black people are allowed to vote, Republicans might lose elections.  Then find a way to keep them from exercising their electoral franchise.  Every political machine in history knows that the key to winning elections is control of the ballot boxes.  Having real people show up and vote is too damn hard, even if you are paying them (although political patronage and walking around money help win with legitimately cast votes).  If you want to steal elections, make up the vote totals.  That is why the paper trail is important, and the electronic voting machines without paper records were so creepy.  But Republicans have this idea that poor people who they claim are really lazy (or are really old) actually go to the trouble of going several different places to vote, even though about as many people don't go to the trouble of voting once as who actually vote.  Does that make sense to you?  It doesn't make sense to me.