There are tons of ways to make the voting process more secure that don't involve adding more hoops for voters to jump through. Funding investigations and observers, reforming voting machines like Georgia did so that there is an accurate paper trail, updating voter rolls with existing information like death certificates and change-of-address, and many others.
ID is not, realistically speaking, a hoop. You basically can't function in legal society without photo ID. The incredibly, incredibly overwhelming majority of people who can legally vote to begin with already have some form of government issued photo ID. Hell, I have two in my wallet. The rounding error of people who don't can get one, it's not that big a deal. I'm even fine with making it free, although I'm aware it currently isn't in most cases.
It is a small minority of people hampered by this - but that number is vastly more than the number in-person fraud cases that might be prevented. There are hundreds of thousands of people who don't have a current valid ID, and they'd have to pay to get one.
It's free in a lot of places and should be free. If nothing else, to end this stupid claim that it's some burden to get an ID when even most of the lowliest nations on the planet can manage to find a way to distribute IDs to everyone.
I have seen nothing to suggest that in-person fraud (i.e. someone comes in and lies about their identity to vote) is at all significant. One easy way to at least identify when this is happening is to send mail or other update to the legal voter of when and where they voted. If someone lied about being them, they can speak up.
Here is the problem with this kind of claim: in most places, there is no enforcement arm looking to see if there is in-person fraud happening. It's EXTREMELY rare that the Government looks, and I mean actually looks, to see what's going on.
One of the very few rare times the Government REALLY looked at an election was the Bob Dornan/ Loretta Sanchez case.
A 1996 INS investigation into alleged Motor Voter fraud in California's 46th congressional district, together with a Congressional Task Force and state investigation, discovered that 4,023 illegal voters possibly cast ballots in the disputed election between Republican Robert Dornan and Democrat Loretta Sanchez. After a careful comparison between the Orange County voter registration files and INS databases the Task Force was able to clearly and convincingly document that 624 persons had illegally registered and thus were not eligible to cast ballots in the November 1996 election. In addition, the Task Force discovered 196 instances where there is a circumstantial indication that a voter registered illegally. Further, the Orange County Registrar of voters voided 124 improper absentee ballots. In total, the Task Force found clear and convincing evidence that 748 invalid votes were cast in this election. Dornan lost by 984 votes.
That's actually quite a lot of voter fraud. So what have we changed to prevent that from ever happening again since 1996?
Essentially nothing. We actually made it EASIER to do that sort of thing here in California, not harder. And we DON'T CHECK to see if it's happening. The only real check on the system is if a private citizen files a complaint because they have evidence of fraud - otherwise, they don't even ask for any form of ID in California. You just show up, state your name, and that's it. How would we know if there was fraud going on at the ballot without checking? What check on the system is there to validate someone is allowed to registered to vote?
To me that's like saying nobody is speeding on the freeways, after we pull all highway patrol and no longer look to see if anyone is speeding on the freeways and depend only on another driver calling in a complaint about a speeder.