We've been getting variations on the "if only minorities didn't vote, Romney would have won" theme since the election, but so far no one has tried to lead the way in showing how to achieve that laudable goal. Until now. Here is the co-chair of Mitt Romney's Wisconsin campaign agreeing that Voter ID "would have made a difference" in Wisconsin (you have to click through and get to about 4:10 in the video).

Obama won Wisconsin by over 200,000 votes, so Alberta Darling must think there was a lot of fraud going on. I'm sure the actual instances of voter fraud were closer to 0. More likely she knows that many citizens who are legally entitled to vote, especially older and poorer people, simply don't have photo IDs, and she'd prefer if those sorts of people, who are likely Obama supporters, don't get to exercise their rights.

She goes on to say:

I know people will go, 'We don't have fraud and abuse in our elections.' But why, why can't we have voter ID when the majority of our people in Wisconsin wanted it, we passed it, the governor signed it? Why should one judge in Dane County be able to hold it up?

It's the same reason that the South didn't get to keep their Jim Crow laws even though a majority of people wanted it and the governor signed it.

I do understand why a lot of non-racist and non-partisan people support this law. Logically, it makes sense. We don't want people voting more than once and you should be required to prove you are who you say you are. But people need to realize the motivations driving this, and the fact that there are literally no instances of actual voter fraud*.

And people who have drivers licenses don't think about how onerous it is for a 70 year old lady who lived in the city her whole life and never needed a car to get (and pay for) a generic photo ID. Many don't even have the documentation necessary to get those IDs; that doesn't make them illegal.

And despite the lack of IDs, it's really difficult to actually vote more than once. When i went to vote this time, some idiot from another district with the same last name voted as me; even signed his name with a completely different signature right next to mine. Let's posit that he was actually committing fraud, and he voted in his own district as well. Well, when i got there and tried to vote, the officials clearly saw something was wrong. Granted they didn't know quite what to do about it, and if you asked me right there if i supported Voter ID i probably would have said yes, but in the end they were going to find the guy in his correct district and move the vote. I imagine if they found he voted there too they'd throw his duplicate vote away.

I suppose if this theoretical fraud knew that i didn't intend to vote he could have gotten away with it but it seems like high risk for little reward.

You could get passive support from me on issuing a National Voter ID to everyone when they receive their birth certificate and then requiring people born in 2014 or later to produce them at the voting booth. Republicans have said that even there are no instances of voter fraud today, it's good to require Voter ID as a preventative measure (in contrast to supporting regulation as preventative measures in just about any other area, suspiciously). So presumably they wouldn't mind waiting until 2032 to see this implemented. But it still seems like a lot of time, money, and energy spent to fix a non-existent problem, unless there's some other motive at play, which i think Darling's comments show is the case.

*Please don't tell me about instances of voter registration fraud (like someone filling out a registration card for Mickey Mouse) or cases where someone got arrested trying to prove that voter fraud exists.