Voter ID may or may not be a good idea - but what's the evidence we have a problem?

Whether or not voter ID should be demanded isn't our point here. Rather, we want to point to the illogic being used. Here's a Labour MP:

The introduction of voter ID is intended to help reduce electoral fraud. However, In 2017 there was only one convicted case of electoral fraud based on impersonation. Furthermore, the UK’s official statistics watchdog, the ‘UK statistics authority’ condemned the Government’s argument that voter fraud has more than doubled in two years as misleading.

That there was only one conviction for impersonation doesn't tell us much about the prevalence of it. You know, given that there are near no checks upon it in the first place. Which is why the tests of course:

More than one in FIVE polling stations turned away voters for not having ID during a hated Tory trial, a volunteer group says.

The astonishing claim would suggest more people were turned away in five areas than ALL last year's in-person voter fraud cases in the entire country put together.

When we do start checking we then find many more problems. Whatever else we might say we cannot then insist that before we started checking the absence of cases means that there's no problem, can we? Precisely because checking reveals problems that we might want to deal with.

Obviously enough there are different potential explanations for the problems. We Brits - thankfully and rightly - don't carry nor have an ID card so we've often not got a manner of proving who we are. It's also possible - possible note - that impersonation is very much more common than our previous system of not checking led us to think. The point being here that we are getting a different result by checking. That's new information that we've got to consider, not a time for us to be insisting that we've historically not prosecuted many.

The very fact that checking produces more cases means that what we believed before may well be wrong, doesn't it?