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Enter VBM and activists getting illegals to sign things they don’t understand because the activist is…otherwise helpful
If you’re running an operation in which people show up at polling stations, declare they’re citizens under false identities and vote under false pretenses then you have no need for illegals and are in fact best served by using ideologically committed fellow activists who definitely won’t sell their story or give you up for nothing if caught.
If you wanted to use illegal migrants in a voting scheme, why would you ever bring them to a polling station?
Ballot harvesting has far fewer oversight and procedural control mechanisms.
If you're ballot harvesting the votes of illegal migrants, what's the difference between doing so and just making up names? Why do you need a real life illegal immigrant to register to vote illegally when, by definition, the illegal alien won't have a legitimate SSN, won't have a legitimate birth certificate and so won't have a legitimate (non AB60 or equivalent) license? Of course many have fakes of the above, but if you're just registering fake voters for such a ballot harvesting scheme the illegals themselves are unnecessary in that case. You might as well have your own citizen activists register or vote as dead people, vote multiple times, impersonate others etc. which hugely minimizes the risk of the plot getting out.
Aside from noting that you're changing the basis of your objection, facilitating a political machine coalition. Illegal voters can still be engaged and mobilized in mass politics; fake voters can't.
Why do you think you need a legitimate SSN, legitimate birth certificate, or legitimate license, to vote remotely in the sort of localities which have facilitated mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting?
Especially when you note that good-enough fakes are available to many?
If an illegal migrant has fake documentation that enables them to vote, you're not registering fake voters, you're registering real voters. After all, they have real-fake documentation- and who are you to say otherwise? Or that the vote-registering person knew otherwise?
Separating the steps of fraud between different actors is a pretty basic way to facilitate fraud. In the same way that you don't have to know the criminal source of money to launder money, and thus the main money launderers are notoriously incurious about verifying income sources, you don't need to know that a voter is invalid to register/facilitate an illegal voter. As long as root systems exist to facilitate the documentation that enables legal voting, the presumption by the persons interfacing with the illegal voters can simply be that anyone with the nominal documentation is a legal voter. At which point, it largely falls on the voter to identify themselves as illegal, or else the presumption can be that they are legal.
(In fact, if you want to get very cynical, the illegal migrant registering that they are NOT a legal voter is putting themselves at risk by openly identifying why they can't vote, and the fraudulent nature of any documentation that says otherwise. At which point, it's in their own interest to go ahead and lie that they're totally legal, they're totally willing to do what they're allowed to do, and thus keep their heads down.)
This, in turn, creates yet more barriers against positively identifying any crime, as even if you identified that a particular ballot was tied to a particular individual (which is almost impossible, because that's rather the point of anonymous voting), it's also going to be nearly impossible to prove that the person facilitating the vote knew they were illegal (because they don't need to know that).
Unnecessary to conduct fraud in general =/= not beneficial to facilitate fraud in a specific way.
A significant point of ballot harvesting is to shape and influence the vote (nominally to just have the vote occur and be delivered, but also potentially to shape the decision and delivery in partisan favor), while leading people to actively vote builds buy-in for the system and the party that facilitates the harvesting (voting as a ritual, familial party affiliation, and so on). Moreover, a common point of complicity-collaboration schemes is that mutual effort / complicity creates coalitions that stick together. On the legal side this includes things like hazing rituals, while on blatantly illegal sides this can include things like 'force someone to cross a line of no return' so that they can't back out.
And that's when there are meaningful risks. In credible forms of illegal migrant voter fraud, as the risks of detection are incredibly minute, the risk of mutual incrimination are virtually non-existent (because the harvestor doesn't need to know that the illegal voter was voting illegally), and the partisan faction most able to establish a system enabling illegal voting is also the least likely to acknowledge or prosecute the avenue.
From a partisan perspective, facilitating illegal voter fraud from the illegal migrant population is a way to draw them into the political machine. Political machines aren't just voting block devices, but jobs programs, friends in high places, and bodies-on-streets mobilizers. The relevance of a political machine to immigrant communities is a matter of historical records, as much as the familial/tribal nature of dependent voting blocks.
A non-existent voter doesn't do nearly as much for a political machine as a real voter, even- or especially- illegal voters. The voters will identify their interests with the machine that is most likely to benefit them/least likely to expose them, there is complicity that pressures them against defecting, and best of all said complicity doesn't have to be mutual for mutual incrimination, because the political machine aparatus can be willfully (and genuinely) ignorant of the legal-status of the voters that the machine facilitate.
I disagree that there is a risk to hugely minimize, because the risk is already hugely minimal to nonexistent, and there doesn't need to be plot, just structural enabling and incentives.
I don’t disagree with the majority of what you write here, my point is just that none of it necessitates the physical flesh-and-blood body of the illegal immigrant and their active participation in the scheme. Most illegal immigrants with fake ID/SSN/etc take them from dead people, duplicate living people’s identities (with or without their permission) etc. If you just need this information to register and then collect an illegitimate vote, why do you need the illegal when you can cut out the middleman and do it yourself?
You suggest it’s in the interests of illegals immigrants to join a political machine and to vote in their own interests (presumably in favor of candidates more likely to offer them amnesty / sanctuary and so on). But this isn’t how most illegal migrants in the US think. Many have little understanding of sanctuary policy (which is why eg so few have come forward to collect welfare or college assistance or healthcare entitlements in blue states that specifically fund these services for ‘undocumented’ people). Most illegal immigrants think enforcement is much tougher than it is and that anything conspicuous could result in them being caught by ICE and deported, they aren’t typically going to trust some Dem operative telling them it’s a sure thing to vote illegally don’t worry about it. Their goal is typically to minimize as far as possible their involvement with the federal government and to stay under the radar, and they consider voting to be an interaction with that government.
Illegals are in almost all cases coming from countries where the peasantry has no real influence on political elites, or they think it doesn’t. They don’t conceive themselves as having a real opportunity to change their circumstances by voting. They don’t want to join a political machine.
Shady behavior around ballot harvesting is much more likely to involve low-propensity-to-vote citizens than it is to involve illegal migrants.
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