Voter Fraud and Voter Turnout

Allegation: Too many ineligibles are voting.

Premise: Ineligibles are in fact showing up to vote.

   Remember Tammany Hall under Boss Tweed?  Those were the glory days of voter fraud, when the motto was "Vote Early and Often."
   More recently, there has much more ado about voter fraud, with allegations of illegal aliens (picture little green men shaped like pickles) showing up in great numbers to cast ballots. The solution, many claim, is to require photo identification cards, so that only those really eligible get to vote.
   But a more relevant problem may be voter turnout, encouraging the many millions who are actually eligible to show up and vote.

   Generally, more than one-third of eligible Americans fail to vote in Presidential elections, and in some years the number of non-voters is nearly half of all those eligible.
   The largest proportion, according to statistics kept by the Federal Election Commission, was in 1960, when 62.8 percent of the voting age population turned out in the Kennedy-Nixon contest. And in the 80 years since these results were kept, the lowest percentage of voter turnout was in 1996, when 49.0 percent of the eligible population showed up to elect Bill Clinton over Bob Dole or Ross Perot.

   A few months ago, the Conservative Web site TrueTheVote reported it found 99 cases of "potential felony voter fraud," and that 46 states "have prosecuted or convicted cases of voter fraud" since the year 2000. The site does not indicate how many of the 99 potential cases resulted in convictions, nor does it give a time frame for these 99 cases.
   More recently, ABC News reported that "of 197 million votes cast for federal candidates between 2002 and 2005, only 40 voters were indicted," and that of those 40, there were only 26 convictions or guilty pleas. That amounts to 0.00000013 percent of all votes.

   So to hear all the hooing and hawing, one would think that polling places are being inundated by  illegal aliens and/or other types of ineligible voters.

   A better answer would be to increase the percentage of those actually eligible to show up. Presidential elections attract, at best, perhaps two-thirds of the eligible population. Other elections -- state and local contests, as well as non-presidential federal elections -- attract even fewer voters.

   Compare the U.S. turnout percentage with that of Canada, which in its best year brought a 79.4 percent turnout in 1958, two years before JFK's victory in the U.S., with its record turnout of 62.8 percent. Canada's lowest turnout year was in 2008, with a 58.8 percent eligibility turnout. And that's still better than the 49.0 percent who showed up in the Clinton-Dole-Perot year of 1996.
   In the United Kingdom, the lowest voter turnout was in 2001, which attracted 59.4 percent of eligible voters; its best year was 1950, when 83.9 percent of voters showed up.

   So is there a problem in America with voter fraud and ineligible voters clouding results? Or is it that one side wants to better its own chances by limiting the numbers of those likely to vote for the opposition? And would it be a better solution to devote resources to increasing overall turnout, rather than sniping at the potential opposition?
   Or is one side too afraid it will lose if it increases overall turnout?