The "Voter Fraud" Fraud - Ari Berman

Between 2000 and 2007, there were 32,299 UFO sightings in the United States, 352 deaths caused by lightning, but only nine cases of voter impersonation, according to a great new infographic by Craiglist founder Craig Newmark.

Yet conservatives continue to hype the extremely rare occurrence of election fraud as if it were a widespread problem and is somehow responsible for the election of Obama. And there is evidence that they’ve been successful in pushing this fact-free narrative among the broader public.

In 2009, Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin of Occidental College studied the media coverage of ACORN during the 2008 election and concluded:

• 82.8% of the stories failed to mention that actual voter fraud is very rare
• 80.3% of the stories failed to mention that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as required by law
• 85.1% of the stories about ACORN failed to note that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its (mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems
• 95.8% of the stories failed to provide deeper context, especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of "voter fraud" to dampen voting by low‐income and minority Americans, including the firing of U.S. Attorneys who refused to cooperate with the politicization of voter-fraud accusations—firings that ultimately led to the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

The real story in 2012 is how the myth of voter fraud has been advanced by Republicans to justify new voting restrictions in more than a dozen states, which could disenfranchise up to 5 million voters on Election Day, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. That’s a whole lot of casualties in response to a few bad actors.

The full article is available here