More Voter ID Shenanigans From The Tribune-Review

Let's take a break from the impending impeachment of the little-handed pussy-grabber and take a look at some more regular conservative disinformation, shall we?

Like this piece on today's Tribune-Review op-ed page:

The liberal narrative that voter fraud is a figment of conservatives' imagination took an illuminating turn in Virginia, where a voter-integrity group has documented 5,500 noncitizen registrants between 2011 and 2017. At least 1,852 of them cast ballots during that time.

One noncitizen said she voted in 14 different elections and wasn't removed from the voter rolls until she, herself, reported being a noncitizen, according to a new report by the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Based on the group's findings, the largest number of ineligible votes cast in a Virginia election were 1,065 in 2008, a presidential election year.

If you are fact-checking at home (and that's something I'd encourage EVERY citizen of EVERY political persuasion to do - especially now in the Age of Trump) the first thing to check is this "voter-integrity" group named the "Public Interest Legal Foundation."

Who are they? Who runs the shop? Do they do good work? And finally, is the Trib completely honest in calling them a "voter-integrity group"?

It's that last question where the Trib first trips up. This is how The Daily Signal describes the PILF in a piece on this exact report:

Virginia election officials removed thousands of voters from voter rolls between 2011 and May 2017, according to a conservative legal organization.

In a report released Tuesday, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group, found 5,556 voters were removed because they were noncitizens and that one-third of those removed voted illegally.[Emphasis added.]

And before you wonder whether The Daily Caller Signal is some biased left-wing "news" website, take a look at this from their "About" page:

More and more people are grabbing bites of news from mobile devices on the go—and they need a place where they can find digestible, trusted news on the most important policy debate of the day.

That’s why the Heritage Foundation team created a digital-first, multimedia news platform called The Daily Signal. [Emphasis added.]

So when The Daily Caller Signal says the PILF is a "conservative legal group", it's The Heritage Foundation talking.

So the first question you have to ask yourself right now is: Why doesn't the Tribune-Review editorial board want you to know that the PILF is conservative?  It's certainly ok for the (Scaife-funded) Heritage Foundation to say so, so why not the Trib?

Do they think that it'll negatively frame your opinion of the report?  Why would that be, exactly?

Now, let's look at whether the report can be trusted. At 24 pages, it's probably ill-advised to go page-by-page (I'd probably lose your interest at page 5 or so) so let's just look at one "astonishing" example.

This one, on page 17:

In one astonishing example, a non-citizen was invited to remain on the voter rolls even after he had informed election officials he was an alien.When William Leslie Gray registered to vote in 2007, he checked “yes” in response to the application’s citizenship question. In 2010, Mr. Gray renewed his driver’s license and on his application, he checked “no” to the citizenship question.

The inconsistencies in Mr. Gray’s answers alerted election officials that he might not be eligible to vote. His registration, however, was not cancelled. Instead, Mr. Gray was mailed an “Affirmation of Citizenship,” which asked Mr. Gray to affirm, subject to penalty of law, that he was a U.S. citizen. Mr. Gray signed the form and returned it. In May 2015, Mr. Gray’s voter registration was cancelled after election officials determined that he was, in fact, not a U.S. citizen. [Emphasis added. You'll see why in a few paragraphs.]

There's an end note that leads to Exhibit 13.  Take a look at the chronology here:

• 02/12/2007 - Gray's driver's license application, where he checks the "yes" box
• 02/18/2010 - Gray's renewal application, where he initials in the "no" box
• 05/10/2010 - Gray's "Affirmation of Citizenship" form, where he declares he IS a citizen.

Now take a look at the internal notes and the chronology found there:

And what do we see?

• 04/10/2010 - "Declared non-citizen cancelled" (this is AFTER Gray's license renewal form)
• 05/17/2010 - "Returned Affirmation of Citizenship"
• 05/18/2010 - "Reinstated"
• 02/12/2015 - "Deceased"

Take a closer look at that chronology. So what happened in 2015? It clearly says that in 2015 William Gray is deceased (and that's what, presumably, gets him off the voter rolls - not any question of his citizenship). It also clearly states that he was reinstated Gray after they received his affirmation of citizenship.  The day after, in fact.

Now go back and look at how the report describes this paperwork.

This is the "astonishing example" they're using to prove non-citizens are voting in droves in Virginia. If such a big part of the report is so obviously wrong what does that say about the rest of it?

These are lies, plain and simple - it's hardly surprising they show up on the Trib's Op-Ed page.

UPDATE: I mislabeled The Daily Signal.  Sorry.

Reality Catches Up To The Braintrust. Again

Remember this blog post?

The blog post linked to this Op-Ed in the Tribune-Review that said, in part, this:

Among the Obama administration's re-election cheerleaders, none is more duplicitous than Attorney General Eric Holder, whose sis-boom-ba on "voter rights" is sorely out of sync with factual accounts of fraud.

Last month the Justice Department blocked a South Carolina photo-identification law, insisting it makes voting more difficult for minorities. At a rally in Columbia, S.C., last week, Mr. Holder said defending that cause is "a moral imperative," The Washington Post reported.

But Holder's presumptuous intervention in South Carolina backfired. In response, that state's attorney general, Alan Wilson, did some digging and found that at least 900 dead people voted in South Carolina's 2010 election, writes Peter Hannaford for The American Spectator. Mr. Wilson is going to court to restore the law.

Turns out this (the story of the dead people voting in South Carolina) is completely untrue.

From the AP:

No one intentionally cast a ballot in South Carolina using the names of dead people in recent elections, despite allegations to the contrary, according to a State Law Enforcement Division report obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

Attorney General Alan Wilson asked the agency to investigate last year after the Department of Motor Vehicles determined in early 2012 that more than 900 people listed as deceased also had voted in recent years.

The initial story was broken by the Columbia Free Times:

A year and a half after a zombie voter fever fell over Republicans in campaign mode, a state police investigation found no indication that anyone purposefully cast a ballot using the name of a dead person in South Carolina.

Responding to an open records request, the S.C. Law Enforcement Division today released its final report to Free Times, one day before a federal holiday. SLED found no indication of voter fraud. [Emphasis added.]

So, now that we've found yet another Voter "Fraud" mistake on the pages of Richard Mellon Scaife's editorial page, will the braintrust be making any sort of correction?

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?