Do fake ID cards pose a threat to fair elections?
Voting with a fake ID document is not a major threat to election security, given advance registration processes, polling-day ID requirements in two-thirds of the states and the difficulty of organizing in numbers sufficient to have an impact on the outcome.
A Heritage Foundation database, listing 1,300 credible cases of voter fraud since 1979, notes 13 cases of "impersonation fraud at the polls." "This is a slow, clunky way to steal an election," a law professor wrote in 2014, "which is why it rarely happens."
Voting with a deceased person's stolen identity is theoretically possible, as voter records rarely purge the deceased. In 2019, an undocumented immigrant in San Antonio was indicted for using a deceased man's identity to acquire key legal documents and to vote several times over a twenty-five year period.
