Ahem, yes.  Yes, the fact that you pointed out mail-in fraud as a potential problem is what I was referring to when I said SpokenTruth "validated your previously-stated position" to some extent.  However, in this thread it appears to me that you have focused on defending laws purporting to protect against in-person voter fraud, and you have argued that such fraud is enough of a problem to justify the laws and the burden they impose. 

(In fact, you went so far as to say "voter suppression laws are not a thing", contradicting the verdicts in court cases such as the North Carolina one with the infamous "surgical precision" line.  I would be somewhat interested to hear how you reckon "let's find out what types of ID white people use and black people use and then allow the predominantly-white IDs and disallow the predominantly-black IDs" is not a "voter suppression" law.  But anyway...)

The problem with characterizing the report of mail-in ballot voter fraud as a sweeping validation of your position is that it in no way supports your position that in-person voter fraud is common enough to justify the measures being put in place with the alleged goal of stopping it.  Nor does it validate your support of said laws from the perspective of the law doing anything to prevent the fraud that allegedly occurred, when as far as I know there is no relation between the laws you went to bat for earlier and the alleged fraud SpokenTruth reported. 

Nor does it "blow a hole in" the main thrust of SpokenTruth's point in that he is putting himself in opposition to the aforementioned positions.  His additional objection to the idea of mail-in voter fraud has proven to be wrong; when he discovered that this was the case, he duly reported it.  You took this report as evidence for "the necessity of laws"—presumably laws that would do something about fraud such as what was reported, although you had not AFAIK advocated in favor of such laws in this thread, whereas you had advocated in favor of other laws that AFAIK would do nothing about this specific type of fraud.

The main difference between the fraud suggested in the report and the vast amounts of voter impersonation envisioned by Trump is that the latter would be novel fraudulent votes.  Intercepting legitimate votes and either altering them or discarding them is not something done once or twice by many individuals; it's most effective done prolifically by a small number of bad actors.  There is simply no justification for the idea that there is anyone out there voting hundreds of times by live in-person voter impersonation.  If anyone is doing it by mail, I would imagine they'd have to do it by a scheme at least somewhat similar in concept to the one reported, which is to say that at a minimum it would have to identify legitimate voters whose vote had not yet been counted and who would not be voting in the future.  The interception of mail-in ballots (which is the alleged fraud in this case) is one of the few ways I can see this being done; the only other reliable way would to identify people who literally cannot vote (e.g. dead people), though like you I am not a master criminal.  Therefore, it seems more profitable to police voter registries for nonexistent people; yet so many Republicans, and you, focus instead on in-person impersonators who, if impersonating actual voters, are literally more likely to expose themselves in direct proportion to the magnitude of their crime—collectively, not individually—yet time and again searches for such in person impersonations have been fruitless. 

Relatedly, I'd like you to put your agreement on record that it is absolutely ridiculous that "only six of the 31 states with voter ID laws also impose similar requirements on people who mail in absentee ballots".  (sez Wikipedia, while I was fooling around in the writing of this post)

So if you disagree with the judge what do you think is the reason the republicans got voting trend data based on ethnicity?

This is such blatant misunderstanding that I wonder if you're even paying attention.  Everything that the law chose to restrict affected minorities more.  Which was the reason the court put a stop to it. 

This seems either deliberately disingenuous or incredibly narrowminded.  It doesn't matter which is bigger?  Why wouldn't it, when the one that we have actual evidence is happening is the one NOT receiving legislation purportedly designed to stop it?  Let me rephrase my question from earlier:  do you think it's not unreasonable that they are focusing almost exclusively on in-person voter fraud despite repeated failures to produce evidence of it being a significant problem, instead of focusing on stopping fraud schemes such as this one? 

One person's opinion?  How many judges did you say were on that court?  I was under the impression that an opinion joined by multiple justices or judges could fairly be called their collective "opinion".  And it's not like this is the only law that has been struck down in recent years for the reason that it was unconstitutionally restricting voters' franchise; are you really claiming that it's just because of biased Democratic judges, and that the rest of the judicial system is simply choosing not to call out their bullshit? 

As for "if the case had gone through", when the Supreme Court chose not to hear it, why do you think that [edit: choice] doesn't imply that they didn't think the decision as it stood was likely to be in error?  Do you disagree that this would be the neutral presumption in the absence of evidence to the contrary? 

No, I won't excuse this blatant goalpost-shifting.  The North Carolina legislature requested and received racial data on many forms of IDs; in other words, data on which IDs whites were more likely to have (and lack) and which IDs blacks were more likely to have (and lack).  Then they passed a law that, as I understand the court's ruling, removed as legitimate voter ID exclusively forms of ID that blacks were least likely to lack.  It is not reasonable to believe that this is coincidence without justification that you have not provided me.  You have to work much harder at tying this to allegedly unjustified complaints such as reducing early voting in Ohio. 

I haven't followed the Ohio case, though I have heard of it before; but take care that you don't let your personal bias against early voting color your view.  My understanding is that a thing that is done by a hypothetical corrupt legislative body to disadvantage the other party's voters can expect to be struck down as discriminatory if that motive is provable, no matter whether there is a reasonable motive that some other hypothetical pure-hearted legislative body could have done the exact same thing for.  Let me know if you believe that understanding is in error. 

I mean, look at it another way.  You are telling me that there are always claims that this or that disproportionately affects minority voters, and using that to justify your claim that a given scenario is not actually disproportionately affecting minority voters.  This doesn't follow.  If you think the claims are universal, then that is reason for skepticism; the question must therefore be decided on the merits and not whether someone is complaining.  (Arguably, one could rely on who is complaining, if there were people one trusted involved in the situation.  But anyway.)  And there's reason to suspect that such claims are justified when it grants a partisan advantage to the party pushing for the law in question, which certainly deserves extra scrutiny, though case should be taken not to take the disadvantaged party's complaints as gospel. 

ARE YOU LYING, OR IGNORANT? 

—When Obama said "when you vote, you are a citizen" he did not mean that voting caused a non-citizen to become a citizen.  Only an idiot could believe this.  Also, I presume you agree that Obama is aware that illegal immigrants are not citizens.  (If you disagree, let me know.  But even if you disagree, I would simply put you in the latter category of my question.)  If you think Obama chose his words poorly and could accidentally mislead idiots, you have utterly failed to give the evidence you purport to be giving of "Democratic leaders expressly stating they want illegal aliens to vote". 
—Clearly Obama was referring to the portion of the groups the interview described that are actual citizens, and not bullshit "fake citizens who contribute to this country".  If you disagree, please give evidence that Obama shares the interviewer's definition of the word and I will, if I find the evidence compelling, retract my question and apologize.
—Clearly, Obama was saying that a citizen with non-citizen family should vote without fear that their vote put their family at risk of deportation. 
—Gina Rodriguez, the interviewer, is in actual fact a citizen.  So his words are literally true. 
—Obama's answer continues as follows:  "If you have a family member who maybe is undocumented, then you have an even greater reason to vote … People are discouraged from voting, and part of what is important for Latino citizens is to make your voice heard, because you’re not just speaking for yourself. You’re speaking for family members, friends, classmates of yours in school who may not have a voice. Who can’t legally vote."

1.  If you would think "an argument over which is bigger is not really one I'm interested in happening" when the question is the relative priority level of a house on fire and a trash can on fire, then we'll have to agree to disagree.  

2.  Isn't the "no action between the agent and the government" a possible area of improvement?  I mean surely there could be closer tracking of how many ballots people are collecting from voters than what happened.  Accounting of what specifically was done with ballots not returned, etc. instead of having to rely on citizen whistleblowers to notice thousands disappearing. 

3.  When five people's opinion is enough to determine whether millions of fetuses are people or not, yeah I think it makes a difference. 

4.  You sounded like you were saying that the 4th circuit court is packed full of partisan hacks that rule based on politics and no one does anything about it because ___. 

5.  Didn't know that; thanks for the correction. 
6.  Didn't remember that; thanks for the correction. 

1.  And were all the blocked forms of ID not "usual"?  Unless this is the case I'm not seeing any reason to think it was coincidence. 

2.  I wasn't aware that popular opinion decided court cases.  And I suspect you'd also dispute that popular opinion is on the Democrats' side. 

That may be, but the relevant question is:  can Cindy Hyde-Smith's quote be as easily demonstrated to be harmless when put back in its natural context? 'Cause otherwise, you know, you're just desperately tossing red herrings. 

1.  And if they were passing laws mandating everyone must hose down their trash cans in case they were at risk of catching fire, while doing nothing about electrical problems that caused several known house fires?  I'm talking about priorities and enforcement costs here.  And people are prevented from casting votes they would have otherwise cast with these voter ID laws.  I don't have reason to believe there are tens of thousands of such blockages for every fraud prevention, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was somewhere in the low thousands, and I am sure it's in the hundreds.  If true, would that be worth it?  If you had to make a wild guess, where would you put the ratio of voters discouraged from voting to fraudsters discouraged from frauding? 

2.  The ballots have to show up somewhere.  Why can't they more closely monitor these collection points for hundreds of ballots coming from the same place?  Good catch on the ballot harvesting being illegal, but it doesn't invalidate my point that the system didn't itself catch the fact that so many mail-in ballots went missing.  Perhaps it would have done so in time, but that's not the impression I had.  If that impression is correct that's an area of improvement. 

3.  We're even then. 

1-2.  I'll look into that. 

2-2.  "Voting fraud never happens" is a pretty gross oversimplification that I doubt any judges believe, even if some members of the public do.  Similarly there are member of the public that believe the trade deficit means we literally hand piles of cash to other countries, but I doubt that even the most partisan of policymakers take this view.