More Voter ID Fraud

Yesterday, this hit the news:

Commonwealth Court has refused to revisit its decision striking down Pennsylvania’s controversial voter ID law.

That means the law requiring voters to show ID cards is dead unless the Pennsylvania Supreme Court steps in.

In a 29-page ruling, Commonwealth Court judge Bernard McGinley wrote that the voter ID law failed to provide voters “liberal access” to valid forms of photo ID cards. He wrote that the law therefore potentially deprives thousands of voters of their fundamental right to cast a ballot, and so the ruling rendering the law unconstitutional must stand.

As did this:

A federal judge struck down Wisconsin's voter identification law on Tuesday, declaring that a requirement that voters show a state-issued photo ID at the polls imposes an unfair burden on poor and minority voters.

And so I found it intensely interesting that today, I find this on the pages of Scaife's Tribune-Review:

With looming midterm elections strengthening its politics-first propensity, the Obama administration denies the very real problem that is voting fraud based on a worthless 2012 study and a narrow 2005 Justice Department release.

Judicial Watch senior attorney Robert D. Popper, a former deputy chief of Justice's voting rights section, writes in The Wall Street Journal that President Obama, preaching to Al Sharpton's National Action Network choir, said a study “found only 10 cases of alleged in-person voter impersonation in 12 years.” But Mr. Popper says that 2012 Arizona State University study admits so many gaps in its data that it's “hard to believe any valid conclusions ... can be drawn from” it.

I guess it's not too early to point out the financial entanglements connecting Scaife's paper with Judicial Watch.  According to Bridgeproject, about 94% of all the foundational support received by JW, came from the three foundations controlled by the Tribune-Review's owner, Richard Mellon Scaife.

That alone should skew the skeptic's eye regarding how credible this information is.

But let's go further.  What's up with that Arizona State University Study?  Here it is.  While they admit some limitations to the data, they do bring up an interesting little piece of information that I am sure would be of interest to Scaife's braintrust:

What about the highly publicized list of voter fraud cases gathered by the Republican National Lawyers Association?

News21 began its data-gathering effort in January 2012 by reviewing the more than 300 cases of alleged voter fraud collected by the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA). For years, the RNLA has been urging strict voter-identification laws on the grounds of massive amounts of voter fraud, and in 2011 the organization released a survey of voter fraud cases in America. However, the News21 analysis showed that the RNLA cases, now totaling about 375 cases, consisted mainly of newspaper articles about a range of election issues, with little supporting evidence of actual in-person voter fraud.

And here are the limitations:

Is this database complete?

No. Despite the huge News21 public-records request effort, the team received no useful responses from several states — for instance, the lone cases in the database from Massachusetts, Oklahoma , South Carolina and South Dakota all came from the RNLA survey. Even in states where some local jurisdictions responded, others didn’t. In addition, it is possible that some jurisdictions which did respond failed to include some cases. Another problem is that some responses News21 received were missing important details about each case — from whether the person was convicted or charged to the circumstances of the alleged fraud to the names of those involved. Still, with those caveats, News21 is confident this database is substantially complete and is the largest such collection of election fraud cases gathered by anyone in the United States.

But still the editorial in Scaife's paper quotes the attorney from the Scaife-funded organization who found fault.  Go figure.  Then there's this from the editorial:

And the 2005 Justice “analysis” that Mr. Obama said showed only 40 voters indicted for fraud in 2002-05? It's actually a news release that ignored state-level cases and didn't claim to cover all federal voter-fraud cases, Popper says.

Here's the release.  You can judge for yourself whether it's credible.  I mean it is from the Justice Department and all.  The Bush Justice Department.  Here's what the Times said back then:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

And the braintrust's evidence for voter fraud?  Take a look:

Valid research — such as a 2012 Pew report about 1.8 million dead registered voters and 2.75 million voters registered in more than one state or a cross-check involving Virginia and 21 other states that found 17,000 voters registered in three or more states — doesn't fit Obama's agenda.

Yea and so think about it, if you live in one state and you move to another and register to vote there, or if you happen to pass away between the time you registered to vote and your name is taken off the voter rolls because you're dead, that's evidence that there's voter fraud.  VOTER FRAUD!!!

This wasn't even a good try.