Acorn

“Voter fraud” is a right-wing obsession used to justify restrictive ballot access-limiting measures that are actually designed to suppress turnout among people who tend to vote for Democrats. It does not and cannot exist in anything approaching a large enough scale to affect an election, and even isolated incidents of fraud prove difficult for right-wingers to dredge up to prove that their concerns have merit. Dozens of people have spent years tirelessly attempting to prove that organized “voter fraud” is a real thing and all they have ever managed to prove is that sometimes lazy volunteers make fake registration forms, sometimes former felons mistakenly vote despite being disenfranchised, and sometimes people double-vote. There is nothing remotely resembling coordinated voter fraud, carried out with the intention of stealing an election, taking place anywhere in the United States. Those who sincerely believe that there is are deluded, though most of the people who constantly crow about it don’t sincerely believe in it; they just want to make it harder for blacks and Latinos and poor people to vote.

So O’Keefe, whose modus operandi is “create the corruption you wish to see in the world,” tried to get some ballots in New Hampshire using the names of recently deceased people. And it might’ve worked in a couple of places. Though not all the places. At one polling place his partner was stopped by a kindly old poll worker, and then he ran away.

O’Keefe has pretty clearly violated the law and TPM reports that a federal prosecutor is reviewing his video. But at least he finally proved that voter fraud is a very real threat, and one that could lead to upward of a couple of phony ballots being cast in a statewide primary election, depending on how many registered voters died quite recently. As we all know, once you prove that something is hypothetically possible, it is a factual certainty that ACORN has done it.

And now O’Keefe might finally get that felony conviction that he avoided last time. Fingers crossed.

Spakovsky suspects imminent voter fraud because some people listed on the registration rolls have moved or died:

A source within the Turner camp tells me the campaign sent a letter and campaign literature to all the voters on the permanent list maintained by the Board of Elections who are automatically mailed absentee ballots. They have received hundreds of pieces of returned mail marked “address unknown” or “return to sender” and at least five marked “deceased.”

ACORN!!!

“Voter fraud,” as Matthew Vadum recently explained, is a phony threat hyped by Republican operatives in order to whip up support for rules making it more difficult for poor people, minorities, and other traditional Democratic constituencies to vote. There’s the lowbrow form of “voter fraud” trolling — screeching conspiratorial nonsense about ACORN — and there’s the highbrow kind, practiced most expertly by former Justice Department attorney and Federal Election Commission member Hans A. von Spakovsky.

In classic George W. Bush administration form, von Spakovsky was a Civil Rights division lawyer who hated enforcing civil rights laws and an FEC advisor who hated election laws. His sole, driving concern was doing everything in his power to help the Republican party. Now von Spakovsky, a prime mover behind the politicization of Bush’s Justice Department, spends much of his time accusing the Obama administration of politicizing the Justice Department.

In all his years of attempting to prove that poor people voting too many times is a widespread problem, von Spakovsky has never managed to find any example of documented vote fraud (as opposed to “registration fraud,” which doesn’t actually affect elections) that happened more recently than 1982.

Concerns about “voter fraud” are a fig leaf for anti-democratic restrictions on voting by undesirable populations. If the Democrat does win tomorrow, Republicans have already invented a conspiracy theory explaining why.

The piece is published at the hilariously named “American Thinker” site, because Vadum is too dimwitted even for the Examiner or a Breitbart site or the Washington Times or Human Events or any of the other homes of the conservative movement’s lesser talents.

Here is your pull quote:

Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

Wow, “nonproductive segments of the population.” The bit that likens the act of participation in the democratic process to a crime has gotten the most amount of attention, but the bit where Vadum adopts the language of eugenicists is the real low-light for me.

He probably had to go over-the-top awful to get some buzz. Matthew Vadum is a very silly person who seldom lets facts get in the way of a good made-up story. He made it this far peddling bullshit about ACORN. Sadly, now that there is no such thing as ACORN, people have less of a reason to pay attention to Vadum, and so he just claims that there is still an ACORN and they are still very powerful and evil.

The thing is, conservatives justified their investigations into ACORN by claiming to be rooting out “fraud.” They claimed to care solely about punishing actual crimes. When you write that you actually just oppose letting poor people vote, you’re giving the game away. You’re never supposed to openly state the goals of the conservative movement, because no one but a small cadre of sociopaths actually supports them. (This is why Frank Luntz was invented.)

Mathew Vadum is so incredibly dumb that he probably should not be allowed to vote.

The New York Times has one of those stories that doesn’t actually say anything about how Breitbart is desperately seeking legitimacy and validation from the MSM that he has also supposedly dedicated his career to overthrowing. Breitbart had a sit-down with Matt Lauer this morning to explain that he feels sorry for Weiner but still might release the really dirty picture. “Breitbart boosts cred with Weiner confession,” CBS reports. I realize the objective press doesn’t see it this way, but one shouldn’t win and lose “credibility points” like chips at a blackjack table. One is credible if one is credible, and the fact that an unreliable source is sometimes correct doesn’t make that source suddenly trustworthy.

Just look at ACORN, Breitbart’s biggest coup prior to Anthony Weiner’s admission that he enjoys sexting. Breitbart posted deceptively edited clips with text that misrepresented the conversations that were being secretly videotaped. Breitbart has basically admitted that he never actually checked the full tapes before publishing the stories. As for Shirley Sherrod, he either intentionally and maliciously smeared her or, again, he never bothered to check the whole tape before publishing. He “reported” that ACORN’s Bertha Lewis visited the White House, and when it was revealed that it was a different Bertha Lewis with a different middle initial, he alternated wildly between admiring himself for correcting his original report and claiming that he still thinks it was the ACORN Bertha Lewis. Oh, then he also said that the White House planted people with well-known names on the visitor logs in order to trick Andrew Breitbart into publishing falsehoods. It’s not hard to trick Andrew Breitbart into publishing falsehoods! Just email him falsehoods, and he’ll publish them.

Before he sponsored James O’Keefe there was pseudo-gonzo asshole Pat Dollard, a meth-addicted Hollywood agent who became a right-wing folk hero for going to Iraq and play-acting at being a soldier in support of Bush’s idiotic war. Breitbart thought he was a genius who’d teach the kids today to love combat through fast editing and viral marketing.

He gets defensive about his drinking, the review copies of his new book revealed that he’s signed on to the idiotic conspiracy theory about Bill Ayers ghostwriting “Dreams From My Father,” his sites are still smearing innocent people with deceptive videos as of a month ago, and I could go on, but the basic idea is this man is still ridiculous.

The fact that Breitbart outsourced the actual “reporting” of this story to ABC News might help explain why it panned out better than some of his previous scoops. That’s probably a good model to use, going forward! Just ignore everything he says unless actual legitimate reporters can confirm any of it. I’d say that Breitbart’s stories should be treated with the same kid gloves that the MSM uses when handling exclusives from the National Enquirer, but at least the Enquirer has no agenda beyond selling copies. Breitbart aims to destroy the all-powerful network of leftists that he imagines runs the world, by any means necessary, and his mission is so important that he rarely lets the truth get in the way. Just please remember that next week when he claims he has STUNNING VIDEO of some minor government functionary or college professor announcing his secret plan to turn white kids gay in the name of social justice, or something along those lines.