Voter fraud is a hot topic lately, even as it is basically non-existent. Conservatives want to require voter ID, but this kind of complication is unecessary. The easiest way to kill voter fraud is to mandate voting (and make the day a federal holiday). I doubt this is an original idea, but just thought of it, so decided to write about it.
See, suppose voting is mandated. This means you will probably pay a fine if you don't vote. But voting is made stupid easy - you can request a mail-in ballot, polling locations are made to always be nearby, and voting day is a federal holiday. How do you vote? You just come in to the poll, and identify yourself. That's it. How does this kill fraud? Let's evaluate the two fraud scenarios in a mandated voting world. Scenario one: Someone fraudulently votes on your behalf. Then you come in to vote, but it says you already voted! Well, then they take care of this like they do provisional ballots today, and the correct individual's vote is the one that is counted. Take scenario two: you come in and vote, boom, done. Then someone comes in and tries to fraudulently vote on your behalf. Oops, you already voted, and they get charged with trying to commit voter fraud. Now to be clear, these aren't big innovations in election ideas themselves - I'm pretty sure that's more or less standard procedure. The key is that because everyone has to vote, a third scenario doesn't happen: someone fraudulently votes on your behalf, but you don't come in and vote, and so that ballot isn't challenged. Mind you, this is rare, because you're really gambling when you come in and say who you aren't (if they happened to already have voted, boom, you're arrested). You have something of a one in three chance of getting caught, just to change a single vote... and likely have a hard time voting yourself, as this poll now recognizes you as someone else. It's a really stupid thing to do, even in our current system.
The point is though, in a mandated election scenario, that third scenario is impossible. So no fraudulent votes can get through. So in that case, why would anyone attempt to commit voter fraud? They wouldn't, it's way too risky for a stupidly small payoff (you would need tens of thousands of people, in a tight swing state, to conspire and somehow succeed... this is an incredibly impossible mission... you should have been canvassing). So this means that the cases of ballot clashes will be extremely small compared to the actual tally in each state. It's unlikely those ballot clashes will even span the difference of votes between winner and loser. But even if they did, because resolving ballot clashes will be a stronger evaluation of correct identity, they will result in a trustworthy vote anyways, so it doesn't even matter.
Also, we live in the 21st century. We can figure out who died and remove them from the voter list, without having to purge the whole list. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!
There's a lot of good things about this. The two most obvious being (A) voters have to do practically nothing to be registered (except maybe come of age), (B) it's very easy to vote and avoids the documentation political thorn bush, (C) securely prevents fraud in a robust and effective way, and (D) generates enormous voter turnout. "What if I don't want to vote for any of the candidates?" Then just turn in a blank ballot. Mail in a blank ballot. Or fill in whoever you want. You'll still be checked off as having voted, and won't be penalized. Ideally, no one will ever know it is your ballot, only that you submitted it successfully. Although I don't know much about all of that stuff, that seems fair enough.
The idea that we need voter ID is already really tenuous (see scenario two for why you wouldn't want to try to commit voter fraud), but is basically mathematically moot with mandated voting. The advantage of mandated voting is extraordinary voter turnout. The advantage of a registered voter/voter ID system over that? Idk... less voters? Is that a good thing? So let's just do mandated voting, and not worry about voter fraud.
How do you generate this list? Would take a lot of work perhaps, but probably compiled largely from IRS data and the Social Security administration data (as suggested here).