Remember the dire warnings and shrill allegations of voter fraud surrounding the 2008 election? That ACORN would steal it, that the New Black Panthers were intimidating voters, that fraud across the county would be "rampant?"
They never panned out. ACORN no longer exists. (Although that hasn't stopped 20 percent of the American public from believing they'll try to steal the election.) The DOJ found that the New Black Panthers incident was isolated -- although that case found new life in allegations against the Justice Department itself (more on that below). A five-year effort by the Bush DOJ to weed out fraud, an effort the Obama team said was designed to suppress minority voter turnout, turned up "virtually no evidence."
Voter fraud "exists, and anyone who denies it has no credibility," J. Christian Adams told TPMmuckraker recently. "But it doesn't affect the outcome of elections as much as people say. I don't think that if there's 100 or 1,000 dead voters in, let's say, Texas ... I don't think it's going to affect the outcome of statewide elections."
And yet, with all the evidence against them, the fearmongers of voter fraud -- a mantle most recently taken up by the tea party -- soldier on.
Then there's former ACORN employee Anita MonCrief, a self-described whistleblower who's making the right-wing conference circuit and urging tea partiers to take up the cause of voter fraud. They should keep an eye on places like welfare offices and bus stops, she says, where liberal vote-stealers look for marks. As she tells it, the successors of ACORN use diversity as a ploy.
"I called it 'Operation Darkie Shield,'" she said at one recent conference.
Read more at tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com
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