Do Dogs Vote in St. Louis? Senators Spar over the Need for Voters to Show Photo ID

Justin Levitt, counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, also brought up the 2008 Georgia primary, but argued that since "296 voters arriving without acceptable photo identification reportedly cast ballots that were not counted," the unacceptable effects of the ID law are hardly a myth. He further cited extensive research that indicates that while incidents of voter impersonation at the polls do exist, they are "strikingly rare" and overall less worrisome than other types of fraud and much more common disenfranchisement.

Feinstein noted that she had invited William Welch, chief of DOJ's Public Integrity Section, to help quantify the problem of voter fraud at the polls, but the department "refused to allow him to testify," begging off with a weak promise to send some lesser bureaucrat to squirm under the hot lights at a later time.

Feinstein had also wanted to hear from Welch in the context of DOJ's Bush administration initiative to aggressively pursue investigation and prosecution of voter fraud. "It is my understanding that DOJ failed to complete any Federal prosecutions for impersonation voter fraud," she said.

But the DOJ's dodge was made less effective when David Iglesias, former U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico, testified. Iglesias was one of eight U.S. Attorneys fired in late 2006 for failing to use their offices as partisan tools of the Bush administration.

Iglesias was one of the more aggressive U.S. Attorneys on the issue of vote fraud, convening an election fraud task force in 2004 and reviewing more than 100 complaints, none of which yielded enough evidence to prosecute. Only one case turned up some evidence worthy of follow up, but ultimately, Iglesias judged that the case was not provable. Thus two years of diligent hunting for voter fraud cases in New Mexico produced zero prosecutions.

"I looked for voter fraud," Iglesias said. "I wanted to prosecute voter fraud. But the evidence was not there."