Voter Fraud and "Voter Fraud"

Yawn. Scaife's braintrust is at it again. On the Op-Ed page of today's Tribune review the editorial board has published yet another fact-free warning about "voter fraud." But if you look very carefully, very little of it is about actual voter fraud - it's almost all about voter registration.

Which they have to do as there's almost no voter fraud to speak of. I mean look at this:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

If, after 5 years the Bush's Department of Justice could only find 120 people to charge in five years, then how big a problem could it be?

And then when you look at the Trib's source material, of course, you find the always unmentioned Scaife money.

Let's go take a look:

Leftists will follow their vote-fraud playbook as Barack Obama seeks re-election this year, cautions Accuracy in Media. And the effort will be steeped in the same kind of "community organizing" tactics (think of the former ACORN, think of its Project Vote affiliate) so dear to this president.

In a new Accuracy In Media (aim.org) report...

Ok, time for a pause. According to the Media Matters, foundations controlled by Trib Owner Richard Mellon Scaife granted $4.36 million dollars to AIM between 1985 and 2005.  Whenever you see something like this, you have to ask yourself, "Would the information source being used by The Trib exist in its current form without the Scaife's support?" If the answer is no (and it usually is) then The Trib, by withholding that information from you, is lying by presenting a false picture of reality to you.  So much for accuracy, huh?

But let's keep going.  The Trib continues with a list outlinng the "left's strategy for voter fraud."  See if you can spot the actual fraud here:

• Swamping elections officials with last-minute, largely fraudulent voter registrations
• "Voter suppression" lawsuits that press state officials for taxpayer-funded registration operations
• The Obama Justice Department, supportive of voter intimidation under Attorney General Eric Holder, suing states, backing private lawsuits and resisting reform
• Echoing that narrative, dismissing vote-fraud allegations and promoting legislation friendly to its strategy.
  

So...where's the voting fraud?  I see a lot about registration.  And nothing about how the "largely fraudulent voter registrations" (really?  any evidence for that adverb? None is provided.) leads to voter fraud.

The AIM report tugs a little in that direction:

Swamp election officials with overwhelming numbers of registrations at the last possible minute, a huge proportion of which are deliberately fraudulent, in order to create systematic chaos. [italics in original]

and that chaos, "[p]rovides multiple opportunities for vote fraud."

Again, no evidence is presented to show how fraudulent voter registrations lead to voter fraud.  It's just assumed that it does.

That's a big hole in the reasoning, doncha think?

And of course we already know who to blame for all the voter fraud for which there's no evidence:

Key to understanding the Left’s vote-fraud strategy is the community organizing group ACORN. ACORN has become synonymous with corruption, complicity in the subprime mortgage crisis and especially vote fraud.

ACORN and its voter registration arm, Project Vote, hire marginal and unskilled workers at very low rates and use incentive bonuses or quotas to encourage them to collect as many voter registrations as possible. The resulting flood of registrations are fraught with duplicates, errors and omissions, and a large number are overtly fraudulent, including names like “Donald Duck,” “Mickey Mouse,” “Tony Romo” of the Dallas Cowboys, etc.[2] According to Matthew Vadum, the senior editor at Capital Research Center, a total of 400,000 bogus ACORN registrations were thrown out in 2008 alone.

This is where things start to fold in on themselves.  See that name?  Matthew Vadum?  And the Capital Research Center?

Vadum's the guy who said that registering the poor is like "handing out burglary tools to criminals" and the Capital Research Center?

More unmentioned Scaife money.

And still no evidence of any voter fraud.

That's just how it goes.