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Pete thread got locked so figured I'd give you this info. For starters, it's helpful to know that elections are run at the county and state level (thank god, that's a great part of our system) so each county maintains their voter file independently of the state and federal level. When you go to vote, provided you're registered, the non partisan poll worker (as much as possible, most of these people are clerk types with an interest in the work, not political hacks) will check and see, ah, yes, here you are Joe Schmoe I see your registered in our county, go cast your vote. At this point people say, well why don't you need to prove your Joe Schmoe? Frankly it's because you don't need to, the system guarantees that if someone else walks in later and uses your name the vote the poll watchers (from the two parties, usually these are trained election attorneys) will say look, Joe Schmoe voted twice! They will remove those votes and carry on. Joe Schmoe will get a friendly little invesigation to determine if it was just a mixup or something more nefarious. So by now perhaps you can see what "you need ID types" will say -- they will say, well couldn't you do that and just register a bunch of fake names and then go show up and vote under all of them. I mean, I guess you could, if you wanted to indict yourself on counts of multiple felonies. Or I guess if you could scheme enough people to make it matter (and at a presidential level election you're usually talking tens of thousands of people) to take a possible felony for you, you could get them to go vote too. Mail in voting I am less of an authority on, but I can say prima facie that mail in voting was absolutely fine with the GOP, in fact they loved it because it's how GOP leaning military folks vote -- until Democrats gained an advantage there. My opinion, as someone that studied politics, worked in politics and is engaged in politics is that the GOP knows they are a minority party and will do anything in their power, shady or otherwise, in order to keep power as a minority. I'm not exactly thrilled with the Democratic party, but almost every poll in America will find that GOP voters are outnumbered roughly 6-4, maybe even something closer to 7-3, on a national level right now. The GOP's policies are deeply unpopular. Even in red states things like Medicare for All and drug legalization poll extremely well. Why the GOP doesn't simply embrace more popular positions is anybody's guess. I'd hazard one big one is their donor class, but that's a topic for another day. Hope this helps a bit.