That's a fair point. Though I would argue that improving controls around voters make it easier to detect election fraud. If you can tie each vote to a real person, it becomes very difficult to add an arbitrary number of anonymous votes to a candidate, like how Michael “Ozzie” Myers was doing.
If we're looking at it from a cost-benefit perspective, the ability to ensure that election fraud isn't happening (which disenfranchises all voters) is more important than the downsides of extra voter requirements (which may disenfranchise a much smaller number of voters).
We already have a public list of people who voted. In order for a corrupt election official to undetectably add a large number of votes, they may need to add people to that list (perhaps registered voters who didn’t vote). Election transparency measures and audits might make that harder; voter restrictions do not.
Huh, the DoJ article didn't make it clear that they were using existing identities for the padded votes, only that they were incrementing tallies. From the way it is written, it sounds like they don't need any existing identities at all. Do you believe it impossible to accomplish what Michael Myers did without re-using existing identities?
I’m not sure of the details, but it seems in this case small numbers of votes were added in down-ballot contests, where there were likely sufficiently many voters who would have voted in the election but not in those contests.
If we're looking at it from a cost-benefit perspective, the ability to ensure that election fraud isn't happening (which disenfranchises all voters) is more important than the downsides of extra voter requirements (which may disenfranchise a much smaller number of voters).