Whom is HAVA really supposed to help? Any guesses?

[BurtWorm]

From Kevin Drum:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_10/009750.php

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission is an administrative body created in 2002 as part of the Help America Vote Act. Recently they commissioned a study of voter fraud:

The bipartisan report by two consultants to the election commission casts doubt on the problem those laws are intended to address. “There is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling-place fraud, or at least much less than is claimed, including voter impersonation, ‘dead' voters, non-citizen voting and felon voters,” the report says.


The report, prepared by Tova Wang, an elections expert at the Century Foundation think tank, and Job Serebrov, an Arkansas attorney, says most fraud occurs in the absentee ballot process, such as through coercion or forgery.
That makes sense. Polling place fraud is difficult and risky, and that makes it rare. Absentee ballot fraud, by contrast, is pretty simple to pull off.

So if you want to combat voter fraud, you should put your biggest effort in the place where most fraud occurs, right? And that would be absentee voting.

But of course, there's another consideration: putting restrictions on voting in polling places primarily reduces voter turnout among Democrats. Conversely, restrictions on voting by absentee ballot primarily reduces voter turnout among Republicans.

That's a tough decision, isn't it? Do the right thing, or do the thing that hurts Democratic turnout? Hmmm. What do you think happened in this case? Would it help if I told you that this report was written four months ago and that the Republican chairman of the EAC immediately decided not to release it?