Rick Hasen Demolishes Jeffrey Lord's Claims of Voter Fraud in 9 Easy Tweets

There has been a recent resurgence of spurious, unsubstantiated claims of the existence of serious voter fraud in this country, a trend likely owed to a combination of the Trump campaign's penchant for spreading conspiracy theories and recent court decisions that have struck down voter ID laws in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin. It was combating voter fraud, if you recall, that was the justification voter ID law proponents used to create onerous laws that in reality served largely to disenfranchise the groups most affected by those laws: poor and minority voters. “The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections," was how Judge James D. Peterson put it in a decision striking down parts of Wisconsin's voter ID law. But these realities are incidental to those who prefer to propagate conspiracies, bolstered by stories, headlines and chyrons that report their words, giving their nonsense, by virtue of allowing it to exist as unchecked premises, a false sense of legitimacy. This has been changing recently with the mini-trend of the chyron with built-in fact-check as well as some reporter pushback. And so it came to pass on Monday night, in an exchange on CNN Tonight between Brian Stelter and CNN commentator Jeffrey Lord, in which Lord rehashed the idea that the election could be rigged, to which Stelter replied, "Please, please don't do that to our viewers. Please don't do that to our country at this moment in time." And batting cleanup the next day was Rick Hasen, professor of law and political science, Election Law Blog author, election law expert, election law casebook co-author--a man who clearly has facts and the sweep of voter history on his side, who shows in just nine tweets why Lord, to borrow Hasen's phrasing from his final tweet of the series, "is full of shit." 1/ Two of the three examples of "voter fraud" @CNN commentator Jeffrey Lord points to are very old: 1948 and 1982. As to the third example — Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) August 9, 2016 2/ Philly, I'd suggest looking at Lori Minnite's book, "The Myth of Voter Fraud," which debunks story after story like this — Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) August 9, 2016 3/ The tell is that Lord relies upon totally unreliable reporting by von Spakovsky, Fund, debunked by Minnite #fraudulentfraudsquad — Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) August 9, 2016 4/ More to the point, there are no examples I could find since the early 1980s where an election plausibly thrown by impersonation fraud,and — Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) August 9, 2016 5/ Impersonation fraud is the only kind of fraud a voter id law prevents. We do have more instances of absentee ballot fraud, but — Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) August 9, 2016 6/ Those restrictive Republican voter laws ostensibly targeting voter fraud usually leave absentee ballots alone. If one were serious about — Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) August 9, 2016 7/ If serious about combatting the real voter fraud that takes place, there would be no absentee balloting except w an excuse like illness — Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) August 9, 2016 8/ But Republicans have no appetite to make absentee voting harder,because it is convenient and they benefit from it and amount of fraud low — Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) August 9, 2016 9/ So bottom line:Lord is full of shit and it is hard to believe he is regular @CNN commentator. Actually not so hard to believe these days — Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) August 9, 2016

Fishbowl

Rick Hasen Demolishes Jeffrey Lord's Claims of Voter Fraud in 9 Easy Tweets

"Lord is full of shit."

Corinne Grinapol

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Corinne Grinapol