A strategist for Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign said on Monday morning that voter fraud was virtually nonexistent in the U.S. and yet has somehow become part of the Republican “mythology.”
“I think that all of this stuff that has transpired over the last two years is in search of a solution to a problem, voting fraud, that doesn’t really exist when you look deeply at the question,” strategist Steve Schmidt said on MSNBC.
“It’s part of the mythology now in the Republican Party that there’s widespread voter fraud across the country,” Schmidt said. “In fact, there’s not. Both sides are lawyered up to the nth degree and they’ll all posture back and forth on it but it probably won’t come down to lawyers.”
Republican-led legislatures across the county have passed voter ID laws during the past several years, including laws in Pennsylvania and Texas that have been blocked or delayed by courts.
McCain, Schmidt’s former boss, warned at the last presidential debate in 2008 that the election could be affected voter fraud and claimed the community organizing group known as ACORN was “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
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(h/t ThinkProgress)