USA Today weighs in on the ACORN “vote fraud” controversy with a story headlined “Campaigns Take Aim as New Vote Fraud Allegations Emerge.” The story’s lead suggests a typically bad rendition of the media’s usual “false balance” routine, reporting that the McCain and Obama campaigns are “trading
accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression and gearing up for possible court battles over the outcome.”
Treating well-documented efforts to suppress voters–particularly minority voters–as somehow comparable to the scattered incidents of registration fraud would be bad enough. But the article never really explains the voter suppressionthat ishappening right now in this election (strategies perhaps best explainedin a recent New York Times investigation).
Instead, the piece focuses on Republican criticisms of ACORN (an obsession at Fox News and CNN of late),along with a somewhat confusingreference tovote fraud and registration fraud: “Voter-registration fraud is more common than voter fraud, say voting experts such as Thad Hall of the University of Utah.”Depending on howthat is read, one might conclude that registration fraud is a bigger problem thanvote fraud– a point reinforced by a Republican source quoted in the article. And who knows what to think of voter suppression, whichistossed aside altogether.
The GOP’s strategy is, as Barnard College professor Lorraine Minnette explained to Salon (10/15/08), a simple one:
Ibelieve that what we are seeing are efforts to create mass public confusion, to turn people off and to create chaos on Election Day. This is a campaign strategy to distract people from the voter suppression efforts that actually distort electoral outcomes and to preemptively discredit the potential Obama presidency as fraudulent.
Media coverage like this does little to clarify things for voters.
Here in the oh-so-liberal SF Bay Area, the San Francisco Chronicle (or ChronicLiar, if you believe in truth in advertising) has a piece today that, while calling voter fraud a “minor issue for November”, engages in this same false balance, quoting the ubiquitous “expert”:
“Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a group that tracks election reform issues, … said there’s little evidence to back up claims of massive voter fraud *or voter suppression efforts* (emphasis added) this year.”
The authoritative voice has spoken … we can all rest easy.