Alien Abduction and Voter Impersonation in the 2012 U.S. General Election: Evidence from a Survey List Experiment

State legislatures around the United States have entertained-and passed-laws requiring voters to present various forms of state-issued identification in order to cast ballots. Proponents argue that such laws protect the integrity of the electoral process, sometimes claiming that fraudulent voting is widespread. We report the results of a survey list experiment fielded immediately after the 2012 U.S. general election designed to measure the prevalence of one specific type of voter fraudmost relevant to voter ID laws: voter impersonation. We find no evidence of widespread voter impersonation, even in the states most contested in the presidential or statewide campaigns. We also find that states with strict voter ID laws and states with same-day voter registration are no different from others in the (non) existence of voter impersonation. To address possible "lower bound'' problems with our conclusions we run both parallel and subsequent experiments to calibrate our findings. These ancillary list experiments indicate that the proportion of the population reporting voter impersonation is indistinguishable fromthat reporting abduction by extraterrestrials. Based on this evidence, strict voter ID requirements address a problem that was certainly not common in the 2012 U.S. election. Effort to improve American election infrastructure and security would be better directed toward other initiatives.