12 Nov 2012 Voter Fraud Doesn’t Exist, Claimed MSNBC and Its Allies… And Yet

Voter fraud “doesn’t exist,” claimed MSNBC’s Ed Schultz and numerous other supposedly-informed people with two things in common: a habit of calling conservatives names and a tendency toward creative interpretation in black-white situations.

But they’ll have to do better than this.

Says the Philadelphia Inquirer:

It’s one thing for a Democratic presidential candidate to dominate a Democratic city like Philadelphia, but check out this head-spinning figure: In 59 voting divisions in the city, Mitt Romney received not one vote. Zero. Zilch.

The Inquirer makes a valiant effort to say this could happen in a million years, but then it concedes:

Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who has studied African American precincts, said he had occasionally seen 100 percent of the vote go for the Democratic candidate. Chicago and Atlanta each had precincts that registered no votes for Republican Sen. John McCain in 2008.

“I’d be surprised if there weren’t a handful of precincts that didn’t cast a vote for Romney,” he said. But the number of zero precincts in Philadelphia deserves examination, Sabato added.

“Not a single vote for Romney or even an error? That’s worth looking into,” he said.

The left has pounded the false argument that voter fraud doesn’t exist, and everybody knows it doesn’t exist, so the only motivation for passage of voter ID and other voter integrity measures must be racism.

I was raised in Pittsburgh, where it was taken as a matter of faith that we’d get out-voted by Philadelphia every time it mattered, not only because Philadelphia was bigger, but because Philadelphia would cheat.

And, as I noted in this blog on November 6, no less a hyper-partisan Democrat than Chris Matthews admits there is fraud in Philadelphia:

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews [is] a former Tip O’Neill staffer and reliable liberal cheerleader in most circumstances. When the topic came up on Hardball, Matthews admitted that this type of impersonation fraud has ‘gone on since the Fifties.’ He explained the scheme: Someone calls to enquire whether you voted or are going to vote, and ‘then all of a sudden somebody does come and vote for you.’ Matthews says this is an old strategy in big-city politics: ‘I know all about it in North Philly – it’s what went on, and I believe it still goes on.’ (Source: “Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk” by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky)

(Ed Schultz, call your office. Ask for Chris.)

To be fair, there’s plenty of cheating outside of Philadelphia, too.

Folks, if you genuinely believe voter integrity measures harm certain populations, then take a strong stand against cheating. Then we won’t need those measures anymore.