Here's Kevin on the second New York Times article on voter fraud:
Here's the nickel summary: In 2002, DOJ changed their guidelines to make it easier to prosecute voter fraud. They made it a priority to find voter fraud cases. They appointed a clean slate of U.S. Attorneys loyal to the Republican Party. They set up training classes to help prosecutors charge and win voter fraud cases. But after all that, they managed to demonstrate fraud in a grand total of only 86 cases over four years. And even then, many of the cases of confirmed fraud were simply mistakes, while virtually none of them were actually designed to affect the outcome of an election.
So in four years of concerted effort, the Bush Justice Department managed to come up with maybe half a dozen cases of actual voter fraud. In other words, two or three per election cycle. Mostly in rural districts for low-level offices. And because of this, we're supposed to believe that it's a high priority to spend millions of dollars on voter ID laws that plainly do nothing except make it harder for poor people to vote.
Can we now please put this nonsense to rest? Can we please stop writing stories that treat voter ID laws as if they're sincerely designed to stop voter fraud? There's no longer any excuse.
POSTSCRIPT: This stuff can also ruin lives. Be sure to check out the part of the story about the guy who was deported to Pakistan because he mistakenly filled out a voter registration card while standing in line at the DMV. I'm sure the prosecutor who brought that case is proud of himself.
Well I'd like to think the issue will be laid to rest now, but I'm not sure that's possible. As Kevin's postscript nicely demonstrates, a big part of the effort to convince voters that there's a problem has been to publicly prosecute people for fraud, whether or not they've even given the appearance of committing a crime. The result is that plenty of money and time and life has been wasted but--as a payoff to the Republican party for working on behalf of the people--the greater public still thinks that voter fraud is still a problem. And a couple of pulitzer-worthy New York Times articles are going to have a hard time rolling back that perception.
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