Last updated on February 7th, 2013 at 09:53 pm
When a so called expert on voter fraud was pressed by MSNBC’s Chuck Todd to give specific examples, he babbled James O’Keefe and ACORN then ran for the hills all the while ignoring the rampant plague of Republican voter fraud.
Video clip courtesy of Think Progress:
Tanscript:
DARLING: And there’ve been examples of voter fraud… in Florida. Look at ACORN.
TODD: Where is this voter fraud? I mean it is not this giant…
DARLING: We’ve had recent examples.
TODD: We’re talking about one or two people here, one or two people… and we’re not even a hundred percent sure.
DARLING: We just had a Michigan Congressman [Republican Thaddeus McCotter] resign… not run for re-election because he gathered signatures… his campaign gathered signatures that couldn’t be validated.
TODD: Yeah, but that’s a case of petition signatures being valid. I mean that’s a different law here.
DARLING: Yeah, but it’s very hard to catch voter fraud. Look at what James O’Keefe did. He walked into DC, he didn’t have any ID. One of his guy video…
TODD: Did he vote?
DARLING: No, he didn’t vote.
TODD: See?
DARLING: He didn’t vote. But he asked for a ballot and they were gonna give it to him.
TODD: Right, but you’re actually proving the point here. That the fraud didn’t take place because they prevented it.
DARLING: But it’s very hard to catch the fraud. That’s why you have to do it before Election Day. If you try to do it on Election Day, you’ll never catch any of the fraud.
The right’s reasoning is that it is hard to catch voter fraud and even without any proof that it exists they still need these laws to prevent something that they have no proof is actually occurring. The only thing that the Heritage Foundation’s Brian Darling was expert in was repeating Fox News talking points.
Darling may have been stumped when pressed for examples, but here are a more than a few instances of voter fraud that Republicans don’t want to talk about.
GOP officials in Arizona hopped on the birther train, but have ignored a ring of organizations paid by the Republican Party to engage in voter fraud in the state. In California, Republicans are being investigated for intentionally filing thousands of invalid voter registration forms. Wisconsin Republicans engaged in fraud to get voters to sign petitions opposing the recall of Scott Walker.
There was the high profile case of Mitt Romney committing voter fraud when he voted for Scott Brown in 2010. In Wisconsin, the legislative aide who worked for the architect of the state’s voter ID bill was charged with voter fraud, and in Indiana, the Republican chief election officer for the state was charged and convicted of voter fraud.
Darling was right. There is voter fraud being committed before elections, but what he omitted is that it is Republicans who are engaging in the fraud. The truth about voter fraud is that it literally occurs as often as being struck by lightning. The reason why the Heritage Foundation expert couldn’t provide any specific examples of wide ranging Democratic voter fraud is because they don’t exist.
The voter fraud claims are a smokescreen to cover up Republican efforts to suppress the vote, while engaging in their own voter fraud. The only voter fraud problem we have in this country is Republicans denying citizens their right to vote.
Darling was whole line of reason came unglued and he was reduced to using James O’Keefe’s debunked and discredited edited videos as evidence. Republican reasoning falls apart at the slightest push from the media. It’s too bad that they are too lazy to do their jobs and expose this cocktail of mental illness and voter suppression that Republicans are disguising as public policy.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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