Right-Wing Pundit On Voter Fraud Claim: Never MindHere’s a funny example of how “voter-fraud” hysteria is starting to make some conservatives look kind of foolish.
In a post Friday on the website of the conservative magazine National Review, Jim Geraghty touted the New Mexico GOP’s no-longer-operative claim that 28 people had voted fraudulently in a Democratic primary in June.
Then, attacking Adam Serwer of The American Prospect, who in an earlier post had questioned Geraghty’s obsession with vote fraud, Geraghty wrote:
Now, unless A. Serwer thinks that there is actually a registered voter named “Duran Duran” in New Mexico, he ought to refrain from sputtering that those who disagree with him are ‘racist’ and ‘paranoid.’
The person who is “Duran Duran” almost certainly voted under their real name, and thus got two votes in the primary. God knows how many of those 27 others exist; for all we know, one person might have cast all of them. Anybody who voted once had their vote diluted by the guy who cheated to vote two to twenty-seven times.
Geraghty sourced the Duran Duran claim, via link, to a column on the conservative web site Townhall.com, which described an Associated Press report that we weren’t able to find. (What appears to be the original AP story on the GOP’s claims contained no such detail.)
But it looks like what Geraghty and Townhall thought was a cut-and-dried example of fraudulent voting was no such thing. Some time later, Geraghty, was forced to correct the record, crossing out the quote above and adding the following update below his post:
I am floored by the fact that the white pages for Albuquereque, New Mexico has a listing for “Duran Duran.” Mea culpa.
And sure enough.
The larger point is that, as we noted earlier, since Friday, ACORN has produced election officials to confirm that the “fraudulent” voters cited by the GOP were in fact valid.
Looks like both Republicans and conservative pundits might want to be a little more careful before throwing around claims of voter fraud. Not that we’re holding our breath.
