I'll bet India has less fraud

Here's some big-time voter registration fraud. See this story from Denver:

9News has discovered a record number of fraudulent voter-registrations across the state. [...] Most of the fraud has come from registration drives, where people at grocery stores or on the streets ask you to sign up. 9News has learned many workers have re-registered voters multiple times by changing or making up information about them.

I wonder what it's going to take before legislatures and law enforcement become motivated to crush this growing trend. Because it won't abate until a few thousand people get something on the order of $5,000 fines and/or 30 days in jail. When you've got folks willing to tell a reporter (or even a video camera) that they've registered "about 35 times" and they just chuckle about it... that only happens because they've never ever heard of anybody being punished for such a thing.

And why should it be that these activist organizations bear no responsibility for turning in piles upon piles of fraudulent government forms? One lightning-quick reform idea would be to make the form submitter co-responsible for the document, a responsibility which could be mitigated by attaching copies of three government-issued identifying documents (for example). Because allowing these organizations to crisscross the country and just dump all the responsibility for distinguishing real voters from fakes onto the county offices is absurd.

Plus, consider this: a few vote fraud prosecutions and you have a county fund for hiring the necessary temporary labor for cleaning up the voter registry. A few election cycles and you could be back to a low-fraud equilibrium.

A big opposing force to these remedies is the weird notion that registering to vote is supposed to involve an absolute minimum of inconvenience - so convenient in fact that apparently we don't even insist upon proving residence or identity. Why should registering to vote be any easier than renewing your driver's licence? Why must it be easier than applying for student loans? Yes, I understand that this is one of those sacred rights we have as citizens. But the First Amendment is right up there too - and to me, allowing this sort of sight-unseen, utterly unaccountable registration and voting chaos to persist is like letting folks yell "Fire!" in crowded theatres.