Again With The "Voter Fraud!" Myth

Nothing new here.  Same old right wing myth using the same old right wing media megaphone.

As found in today's Tribune-Review:

Contrary to the “voting fraud is a myth” crowd, a civil rights group alleges glaring voting irregularities in two Mississippi counties. Moreover, it says the Justice Department flatly refuses to enforce Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (aka the “Motor Voter Law”), which requires states “to make a reasonable effort” to remove ineligible voters from registration lists.

The American Civil Rights Union's (ACRU) Election Integrity Defense Project has filed lawsuits in U.S. District Court to force election officials in Jefferson Davis and Walthall counties to clean up their voter rolls.

Let's start with the ACRU, shall we?

According to the Bridge Project, the ACRU has received, over the years, $834,000 in foundation support.  Guess, just guess, how much of that came from foundations controlled by Trib owner, Richard Mellon Scaife?

$700,000 (for those of you sans calculators, that's just about 84% of the total)

And yet no mention of Scaife's overwhelming financial support of the "civil rights group" his news paper is referencing.

But let's move on to their argument.  The braintrust states up front that the ACRU is alleging "voting irregularities" in two Mississippi counties.

Actually, they're not.  Take a look at their press release announcing the law suits (you can read them here and here):

On behalf of the American Civil Rights Union, three former U.S. Justice Department attorneys filed lawsuits today in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi seeking an injunction to compel election officials in Jefferson Davis County and Walthall County to clean up their voter rolls.

Nothing about irregular voting - just about how there are more registered voters than there are voting age residents - a very very different situation.

But as politifact noted recently:

"Inactive" voters generally are those who have gone more than four years without voting, have moved to another jurisdiction or have died.

Under federal law, voters can't be removed from the rolls until it is confirmed they have moved, until there is confirmation of a death or if they have gone without voting for more than four years, or two federal election cycles.

Problems with inaccurate or invalid records plague voter registration rolls nationwide, according to a report issued last February by the non-partisan Pew Center on the States. No evidence of voter fraud was found -- just record-keeping that is badly managed and in disarray.

As Adam Liptak reported on that Pew Center report:

The nation’s voter registration rolls are in disarray, according to a report released Tuesday by the Pew Center on the States. The problems have the potential to affect the outcomes of local, state and federal elections.

One in eight active registrations is invalid or inaccurate. At the same time, one in four people who are eligible to vote — at least 51 million potential voters — are not registered.

The report found that there are about 1.8 million dead people listed as active voters. Some 2.8 million people have active registrations in more than one state. And 12 million registrations have errors serious enough to make it unlikely that mailings based on them will reach voters.

“These problems waste taxpayer dollars, undermine voter confidence and fuel partisan disputes over the integrity of our elections,” said David Becker, director of election initiatives at the center.

Mr. Becker warned that poor record keeping at the registration stage is not evidence of fraud at polling places. “These bad records are not leading to fraud but could lead to the perception of fraud,” he said.[Emphasis added.]

No matter what the de facto post-modernists at the Trib might think, perception of fraud is not fraud.

Certainly not the perception based on the fact that there are more registered voters than there are residents in a given county.  The latter always lags behind the former.

If there was actual voter fraud, doncha think the ACRU would be suing over that?  And not something they could have learned via a Pew Center report?