I don't buy what Fund is selling

by shamanic

John Fund writes in the WSJ's OpinionJournal about the potential for massive voter fraud if Eliot Spitzer's low-grade drivers license for illegal immigrants goes through.

I'd give a lot more credence to his concerns if I didn't know that the GOP has taken advantage of its control of the justice department to spent massive taxpayer resources hunting down allegations of voter fraud in the states and come up with almost nothing to show for it.

How do I know? Because two of the purged US Attorneys were leaders in seeking out voter fraud and invariably came up empty handed. There's a lot of reason to think that's why they were fired. They were considered subject matter experts on election integrity within the DOJ, spoke on the subject at DOJ symposiums, and investigated numerous claims that state Republicans forwarded to them.

And in five years of DOJ hunting for this supposed voter fraud (on the taxpayer's dime, I might add) as of March they had convicted a total of 86 people. Nationwide. Covering three election cycles.

Total number of federal ballots cast in 2002: more than 73,000,000*
Total number of presidential ballots cast in 2004: more than 122,000,000 (pdf)
Total number of federal ballots cast in 2006: more than 80,000,000 (pdf)*

86 voter fraud convictions for the more than 275,000,000 votes cast in the three cycles. Color me unimpressed, and color John Fund as an obsessed partisan.

*Based on votes cast for House of Representatives candidates. This methodology does not include local elections, off-year elections in states like Louisiana and Virginia, primary balloting, or special elections and can reasonably considered an undercount.