Although the state of Texas has announced it will continue to pursue its case for the recently overturned Voter ID law, various analysis reported by the Wall Street Journal still see little to no evidence of a “rampant” problem anywhere in the nation.
…”Some advocates for voter-ID laws point to findings that, in some jurisdictions, registration lists include a large proportion of names that don’t belong—sometimes as high as 3%. Meanwhile, researchers studying voter fraud—a term used to refer to cases in which one voter impersonates another at the poll to cast a fraudulent vote—say they have so far found little direct evidence that the practice is common enough to affect the results of elections, even close ones.
Whether that is because such voter-ID fraud is truly rare, or because researchers haven’t been looking hard enough, remains a subject of debate. So does the idea that the prevalence of voter fraud should figure into a decision whether to pass laws to crack down on the practice—as in requiring voters to present a government identification such as a driver’s license”..
[…]
Prof. [Justin[ Levitt, former counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, which opposes voter-ID laws, [has] tallied nine allegations nationwide between 2000 and 2007 of the sort of fraud that voter-ID laws are meant to address.
A similar study released last month came to similar conclusions. News21, a student-journalism initiative funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, canvassed election officers throughout the U.S. for examples of all sorts of election fraud, and found that impersonation fraud was alleged 10 times, less than 1% of all fraud cases they turned up.”
Source: Voter Fraud: Hard to Identify (Wall Street Journal)
This corresponds roughly with what KHOU 11 News reporter Jeremy Desel found a few weeks ago looking at Texas cases. In all he found less than .001 votes were fraudulent out of 39 million cast since 2003. And the majority of those were mail-in ballots, requiring no ID at all.