The column below reflects the views of the author, and these opinions are neither endorsed nor supported by WisOpinion.com.

U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil has introduced the “Voter ID Act” to strengthen voter confidence and restore trust in our elections. Unfortunately Steil‘s claim that Americans lack confidence in our elections is false. Americans have significantly more confidence in our elections than they do in Congress. Public faith in election integrity hovers near 70%. Trust in Congress remains drastically lower, resting near 12%.

Our elections are so decentralized and with safeguards, transparency and verification systems that any fraud that does occur is either detected and reversed or on a scale too small to make a difference.

A count of voter fraud cases in the six battleground states in 2020 by the Associated Press found fewer than 475 votes in all six states combined were possibly fraudulent. Most were not counted, and not all were for one candidate.

The AP study found no systematic collusion or rigging in those cases. A database search of billions of ballots cast over 40 years of US elections found roughly 1,000 individual examples of possible voter fraud.

These isolated occurrences of fraud are almost always caught by the systems designed to do so and will never rise to the level that changes election results. The amount of fraud is not zero but it is very close to zero.

Steil’s bill, along with his authoring of the SAVE Act, isn’t meant to secure elections. It is meant to ensure certain Americans cannot access the ballot easily.

Steil needs to understand that the path to winning elections is to persuade, not to disenfranchise people from voting.

Congressman Steil’s focus must be on the people in his district struggling to make ends meet, not on stopping people from voting.

Hanson, of Elkhorn, is a member of the Walworth County Democratic Party.