Yes, that's true about most absentee ballots...but that's not where the major voting fraud occurs. After all, unless the election is close, absentee ballots aren't even counted.
The #1 area for fraud is auto-voting. That's where someone else votes for you. You know, like when you don't bother to vote in an election. Lots of people don't vote, so just after the polls close you'll sometimes have corrupt poll watchers filling out a huge stack of ballots. They can do this for as many people as there were who didn't show up that day. They then mark the polling records to show that you and everyone else who didn't show up...voted.
So if there are 550 registered voters in a given precinct who didn't show up to vote, the corrupt poll watchers can fill out up to 550 ballots and then mark each of you as having voted. In this manner someone votes for you if you didn't bother to show up to vote. This grows more pronounced as more people in said precinct move away or die, since they aren't going to show up to vote there ever again. Ditto for having bogus voters registered in that precinct.
Even the most corrupt precinct is limited in how many fraudulent ballots can be cast. This number can't exceed the number of registered voters on the rolls for that precinct, minus the number of people who actually *did* show up to vote (at least, they can't do it without inviting suspicion and official inquiries).
So for that reason alone it makes sense to clean and verify your voting registration rolls often. A simple postcard goes a great distance to that end, too. Such non-forwardable postcards filter out people who have moved, and the postman often catches mail to multiple voters at one residence, dead recipients, and bogus addresses. It isn't foolproof, but it cuts down on the limits of voter fraud.
Requiring a picture ID cuts out ghost-voting, where 1 person pretends to be several other registered "voters," but that's a very small part of overall voter fraud...although it does reduce the amount of illegal alien voting, which might be substantial in some areas.
Combine three things: reliable poll watchers who remain vigilant near the ballot boxes until the bitter end, postcards mailed to all registered voters to clean up the voter registration rolls, and picture id's at the polling booth and you've cut down on the major areas of traditional voter fraud.
How the new computerized voting factors in to this business is yet to be seen, however. Perhaps we'll automate the sending of checksum verifiable voting reciepts to each person who votes such that your vote is still private but that fraud can still be detected.
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