I believe that people who push voter identification requirements are cynical racists who believe in voter suppression as the best way to ensure Republican control and prop up the policies of white supremacy.

But… maybe they’re just stupid. I argue with a lot of people who claim that voter ID laws are just a “common sense” solution the “dangerous” problem of voter fraud. That position is demonstrably ignorant, but centrists tell me that people who believe it need not be self-consciously malignant.

Happily, the honest attempt at actual voter fraud by North Carolina Republicans will give us all a chance to test our hypotheses. If I’m right, the racists will ignore this attempt at fraud. If the centrists are right, these pro-voter ID people will actually learn something.

It’s a brilliant test case because the fraud that (allegedly) took place in North Carolina could not have been stopped by strong voter ID laws. In fact, North Carolina has strong voter ID laws, which did nothing to prevent the fraud potentially carried out by or on behalf of Republican candidate Mark Harris.

If you haven’t been following along, the salient details involve: a raft of “unreturned” absentee ballots from two rural counties in North Carolina’s ninth Congressional district, implausible numbers of Republican votes from the absentee ballots that were returned, a Republican operative who is literally a convicted felon, sworn affidavits claiming that people came around to “collect” unsealed absentee ballots, and an election that the Republican “won” by just 905 votes.

If you were going to run a massive voter fraud scheme to steal an election, this is what it would look like. And voter ID laws didn’t and wouldn’t stop any of it. Look at all the factors you need in play to even attempt to pull off the scheme:

You need a razor-thin election where affecting a handful of votes could make a difference.

You need a scheme that allows all the voters to think that they have voted properly so that you don’t have to let tens of thousands of people in on the plan.

You need some way of suppressing the votes of people legally voting against your candidate.

You need a state board of elections to not notice massive irregularities in counties with long-established voting patterns.

And you need a candidate who will either willfully or ignorantly go along with the scheme.

The Mark Harris campaign checked many of those boxes, and the state board of elections still figured out that something was amiss. The raw math of it sent up red flags. 538 explains:

In six of the district’s eight counties, fewer than 3 percent of total votes were absentee-by-mail ballots. But in Bladen County, that number was 7.3 percent, suggesting a push to get people there to vote by mail. Absentee-by-mail ballots tended to be much better for [Democrat Dan McCready] than other ballots — except in Bladen County. There, absentee-by-mail ballots were more Republican-leaning than the rest of Bladen’s votes by 8 percentage points. But if we look at the whole district, absentee-by-mail ballots were 24 points more Democratic-leaning… Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College who studies North Carolina politics, told the Charlotte Observer that it’s hard to square that statistic with the fact that Harris received 61 percent of Bladen’s absentee-by-mail vote. As Bitzer noted in his analysis, Harris would have had to win every registered Republican, along with nearly every unaffiliated voter and some registered Democrats, to reach that total, which seems implausible. In other counties, McCready’s margin in absentee-by-mail ballots tracked closely with the percentage of absentee-by-mail ballots cast by registered Democrats.

Math stopped the Harris campaign from getting away with this, not voter ID. Absentee ballots in North Carolina have to be sent to a valid address, signed by the voter, and signed by a witness. North Carolina might as well restrict absentee voting to people who sign in blood so they can be verified by DNA. But it was math that alerted authorities that something was wrong with the election results.

Now think about trying to pull off this kind of fraud at the polling place on Election Day, which is the kind of fraud voter ID laws claim to prevent. You’d have to convince thousands of people to show up at polling places and claim to be somebody they are not. You’d have to have some way of knowing that the “real” people, or their friends, would not show up and challenge the fraudsters. And even if you somehow got all of this done, you’d still have the math problem when election officials noticed a county that usually gets 50 percent turnout suddenly has 75 percent and breaks 99-to-1 for one candidate.

North Carolina’s absentee voter fraud scheme PROVES that in-person voter fraud IS NOT A THING TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT. This real life example should break the fever dream of thousands of voters pretending that they’re dead people as a real way to steal an election. If you are actually concerned with the integrity of the elections, you can now be free of your ignorant obsession with voter ID, and focus your efforts on the gerrymandering and suppression that actually results in stolen elections.

That’s if “common sense” is what you are concerned with and not merely suppressing the votes of African-Americans because you don’t like it when black people vote.

[Checks Donald Trump’s Twitter feed for mentions of the North Carolina election scandal.]

Yeah, I thought so.

North Carolina’s Election Turmoil: What We Know and Don’t Know [New York Times]

What The Heck Is Happening In That North Carolina House Race? [538]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.