Rational Abstention and Voter Fraud

A recent article in the Washington Post highlighted states that now require voters to present an ID when they come to vote in order to prevent voter fraud. Despite this new requirement, very little evidence exists to prove that identifying voters would actually make a difference. Additionally, voter rights advocates argue that the new requirement is akin to “poll taxes and literacy tests,” because some people may lack the ability to obtain a proper ID to vote.

In his essay “Voting, Rational Abstention, and Rational Ignorance,” Johnson argues that rational people will not vote in elections because the incentives for voting do not outweigh the costs. So most obviously, the new ID requirement will impose further costs on the voter and will continue to negatively impact voters’ incentives to bother with casting a vote. This will continue to push the voting rate down further in the United States—a pattern Johnson already highlighted in his essay.

The more interesting point was the amount of money spent to fight this fraud (in the case of one investigation, $1.4 million dollars) as well as a law to accompany it with little evidence of any kind of social benefit to society. In other words, there have been great costs imposed on society for a problem that more or less not actually a problem thus creating a huge deadweight loss for society. This deadweight loss for society is hard to calculate because although the governmental investigation costs can be quantified, the cost of time and effort for voters to acquire proper ID can not. Despite this, it can still be assumed that because, as the article states, there is a “solution without a problem” that a notable and unnecessary cost is being imposed on society by the government.