Voter fraud begins at the border, not the ballot box

Get ready for Congress to waste its time fighting over the SAVE Act, with both sides pretending it would do far more evil or good than makes any sense at all.

Don’t get us wrong: Requiring photo ID to vote is a no-brainer, the rule around the world from Albania to Zambia — but it wouldn’t actually be a major factor in cleaning up US elections.

Of course Democrats are absurd in pretending it’s Jim Crow 2.0 (a line they used in denouncing a Georgia law that led to increased minority turnout), as evil as pre-1965 literacy tests or poll taxes.

Hogwash! Participating in society — having a bank account, entering a school building, getting a Social Security card — requires photo ID.

If the barriers to getting it were really so high, be assured we’d be hearing about it.

But the Republican claim — that our elections are at risk from imposters flooding the polls — doesn’t hold up, either: It’s not possible to have thousands of people impersonating real voters (how can you know they won’t show up?), and masses of noncitizens are not going risk severe penalties for registering and voting illegally just to help some Democrat win a race.

Voter fraud at the poll site does happen, but not at scale.

The system does have major weaknesses: Too many counties and even states ignore the federal laws requiring regular cleanup of their voter rolls, purging people who have moved away or died.

And 2020 saw millions of ballots mailed out without request, with laws on ballot security and verification, etc., tossed to the wind under pretext of the pandemic.

Democrats do use illegal immigrants for electoral purposes, but not as voters per se: Bringing in millions of illegals lets blue states avoid losing as many House seats after the Census every 10 years, since noncitizens still count as population for divvying up districts.

Perhaps the debates over the SAVE Act will somehow serve a public purpose, even though Democrats are guaranteed to kill it in the Senate.

But we’d rather Congress spend its time on more urgent issues; save the symbolic fights for the campaign trail.