The Presidential Commission on Election Administration, led by Democratic lawyer Bob Bauer and Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg, who ran the Bush recount efforts in Florida in 2000, has issued a final report that pretty much destroys Republican claims about voter fraud and how elections should be run. Rick Hasan, one of the leading election law experts in the country, has the details.

Basically, the report says that there is very little voter fraud and that what little there is has nothing to do with photo ID laws or voter impersonation:

Consistent with the last point, there’s not much in the report which is overly controversial on the voter fraud-voter suppression debate between Republicans and Democrats, but I did find this line in the report particularly notable: “Fraud is rare, but when it does occur, absentee ballots are often the method of choice.” (Page 56.) That’s my conclusion too, but it is not the typical line of hard line Republicans like KS SOS Kris Kobach.

The way to deal with this is having a better system for logging absentee votes, updating the logs immediately so that those working at the polling places know that a vote was already cast by someone who might also show up to cast a vote in person. Photo ID laws do absolutely nothing to fix that problem, they are designed only to make it more difficult for poor and minority voters to get their ballot cast and counted.

The report also recommends more early voting, something Republicans around the country have been trying to get rid of or restrict because, again, Democratic voters are more likely to vote early than Republicans. It contains a lot of other reasonable reforms that should be viewed as absolutely obvious if not for partisan political bullshit, which is why most of its recommendations will probably be ignored by Republican-dominated states because almost all of this is controlled at the state level.