DEFENDERS of North Carolina's new voter-ID law have been crowing this week. "Hundreds of cases of potential voter fraud uncovered in North Carolina," declared a recent Fox News headline. "Study finds 765 cases of NC voter fraud in 2012 election" echoed theDaily Tar Heel. North Carolina's State Board of Elections recently announced they had discovered 35,750 records of voters whose names and date of birth matched people who had voted in other states. More damningly, 765 North Carolina voters in 2012 had the same last four Social Security digits as people who voted in other states, and dozens more had apparently voted after they had died. Local conservatives have hailed these numbers as evidence that the state's strict new voter rules are essential safeguards against dodgy voter behaviour. “These findings should put to rest ill-informed claims that problems don’t exist and help restore the integrity of our elections process,” declared two leading Republican state politicians in a joint statement. So voter fraud is a serious problem, and the state’s new voter rules—which require photo IDs, among other things—are the solution, right? Well, not quite. For starters, there are good reasons to be sceptical of these numbers. They come courtesy of an interstate data-collection programme that appears to be politically motivated, and is used almost exclusively by states led by Republican lawmakers. Secondly, it seems there are surprisingly large numbers of voters with the same first and last names who share a date of birth. And finally, similar findings of masses of allegedly fraudulent voters in other states have not resulted in any concrete charges. Indeed Kris Kobach, the conservative Kansas politician who helped create the system for assessing repeat voter offenders, couldn't provide evidence of a single legal charge of voter fraud when asked in October 2013.

But such concerns need not hinder North Carolina’s aggressive efforts to combat alleged voter fraud. In what has been described as "the most sweeping anti-voter law in at least decades", the state is rolling back all of the measures that have improved voter turnout in recent years. Besides requiring government-issued photo-IDs (no student or employee IDs), the law eliminates same-day voter registration and reduces the early-voting period. It also allows more corporate donations to parties, removes several disclosure requirements and abolishes a high-school programme that encouraged students to vote.

These rules are a “common sense” way to “protect the integrity of our ballot box,” Pat McCrory explained to me in a recent interview. Yet incidents of voter impersonation are exceedingly rare. In the 30m votes cast in North Carolina between 2000 and 2012, state election officials identified 631 fraud cases, only two of which might've been prevented by the new law. However, the new rules are expected to disproportionately affect minority voters, who tend to stump for Democrats, according to a study from Dartmouth. "You can say what you like, but there is no voter fraud," grumbled Colin Powell, a former secretary of state, to a room full of North Carolina businessmen soon after the law was passed last year.

North Carolina's voter law was passed in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling in 2013, which struck down an element of the Voting Rights Act that aimed to ensure voting laws were not racially discriminatory. Legislatures in Alabama, Texas and elsewhere had already passed laws that politicians claim will prevent fraud, but which are expected to deter non-white voters. What is almost amusing is the fact that these new laws do not address the one area where voter fraud is indeed a problem: absentee ballots.

Mail-based voting has more than tripled since 1980, and now accounts for almost 20% of all votes, according to Adam Liptak at the New York Times. These ballots are also "less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth". Indeed, North Carolina's politicians (of both sides) have a long history of gaming absentee ballots. But while other voting tools such as early voting and same-day registration tend to get used more by Democrats, Republicans statistically prefer absentee ballots. This perhaps explains why Republican lawmakers who wax on about the "integrity of the ballot box" are disinclined to tinker with absentee voting. Indeed, a data-driven system for drumming up absentee Republican votes seems to have helped David Jolly win in Florida's special election earlier this year, and the GOP intends to scale up this effort in other battleground states.