ABC News debunks "voter fraud" bruhaha

I believe the proper expression for this is "tempest in a teapot." ABC News explores the latest frothing-at-the-mouth rantings of the ever-less-important Conservative Base (aka Faux News) around the false premise of "voter fraud" (what they mean to say is "voter registration fraud," since actual "voter fraud" almost never happens).

But McCain's voter fraud worries -- about Acorn or anyone else -- are unsupported by the facts, said experts on election fraud, who recall similar concerns being raised in several previous elections, despite a near-total absence of cases.

"There's no evidence that any of these invalid registrations lead to any invalid votes," said David Becker, project director of the "Make Voting Work" initiative for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Becker should know: he was a lawyer for the Bush administration until 2005, in the Justice Department's voting rights section, which was part of the administration's aggressive anti-vote-fraud effort.

"The Justice Department really made prosecution of voter fraud of this sort a big priority in the first half of this decade, and they really didn't come up with anything," he said.

"We're chasing these ghosts of voter fraud, like chickens without a head," said Lorraine Minnite, a political science professor at Barnard College in New York who has researched voter fraud and fraud claims for most of the past decade. "I think it's completely overblown, I think it's meant to be a distraction."

So can we please go back to talking about Joe the Plumber now? Oh, wait... Never mind.