We already told you how True the Vote, the anti-voter fraud effort launched by a Texas Tea Party group, had lined up two of the biggest stars on the anti-voter fraud circuit for their upcoming national convention.
Now comes news they’ve added three of the biggest voter fraud alarmists in the country: Big Government founder Andrew Breitbart, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund and former Bush Justice Department official Hans von Spakovsky.
A flier posted by the group yesterday announces appearances from the trio at the National Summit on March 25 and 26, in addition to appearances by the J. Christian Adams (the Bush-era DOJ lawyer who criticized the Obama administration for how it handled the voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party) and Anita Moncrief (who was fired from ACORN for alleged financial improprieties and then became a critic).
Andrew Breitbart is well known as a conservative commentator and worked closely with James O’Keefe, who secretly filmed himself posing as a pimp and visiting ACORN offices (the videos helped bring about ACORN’s demise). ACORN had been accused by conservatives of engaging in voter fraud. Several employees of ACORN were prosecuted for defrauding the organization by submitting fraudulent voter registration forms, but those typically don’t lead to actual votes. Both Adams and Moncrief have written for Breitbart’s Big Government website.
John Fund is the guy who quite literally wrote the book about scaring people about the massive threat of voter fraud, especially around election time. He’s also been critical of the Justice Department’s enforcement of voting laws.
Finally, there’s Hans von Spakovsky. In the Bush Justice Department, Department veterans wrote that he was the “point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.” He wanted DOJ to give the thumbs up to several state voter ID measures which critics said had a negative impact on minority voters.
It will also be interesting to see how far Adams goes in raising concerns over voter fraud. He’s made no secret of his distaste for the way Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez ran the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
“I believe that the True the Vote project of King Street Patriots shows that private citizens and patriots like you can do more to fight voter fraud and intimidation than this Justice Department will ever do,” Adams said in a video posted by King Street Patriots.
But he’s also not been as much of a voter fraud fear mongerer as the rest of the lot. He previously told TPM that while voter fraud exists, he said “it doesn’t affect the outcome of elections as much as people say.”
“I don’t think that if there’s 100 or 1,000 dead voters in, let’s say, Texas … I don’t think it’s going to affect the outcome of statewide elections,” he said.
Adams was critical of a report by the Demos public policy center which noted the “sudden silence” of the “fraud-mongerers” in the days after the election. Adams said it was too soon to tell just a few days after the election and said it would take a few months for the results to roll in.
The flier for True the Vote’s national summit is viewable below.
