Washington Examiner editorial page editor Mark Tapscott writes in an October 12 blog post: “Nobody knows with certainty how many illegal votes were cast in the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, but odds are the total was in the millions, thanks to systematic vote fraud campaigns by leftist groups such as ACORN and mis-guided laws that allow individuals to register and vote on the same day.”

Tapscott, however, offers no evidence of “systematic vote fraud” that resulted in “illegal votes” numbering “in the millions” -- perhaps because it didn't happen. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2008, election experts say that voter registration issues that had been associated with ACORN rarely result in fraudulent votes being cast because false and duplicate registrations are typically weeded out. The Chronicle goes on to state that “it's virtually impossible to pull off large-scale voter fraud without being discovered.”

Tapscott's reference to ACORN is nothing more than yet another invocation of a right-wing bogeyman that has become so played out that it was getting tossed around indiscriminately; The Wall Street Journal's John Fund, for instance, insisted that one purported case involved people who allegedly “associated in the past with Acorn” that “may have” been involved in “advising” people “on how to perform” voter fraud, citing unnamed “local politicos.” Scaremongering aside, Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall has pointed out that any actual vote fraud cases allegedly involving ACORN have been isolated.

Tapscott's baseless claim came in service to promoting Pajamas Media's "Voter Fraud Watch." He touted how one prominent name linked to Pajamas Media's project is “J. Christian Adams, the courageous former Justice Department attorney who blew the whistle on the Obama administration's craven cave-in to Political Correctness and left-wing ideology in the New Black Panthers Case.”

This would be the same the right-wing activist J. Christian Adams whose allegations regarding DOJ and the New Black Panthers case have been repeatedly discredited.

The supposed “legal expertise” Adams intends to provide to “Voter Fraud Watch” doesn't exactly enhance the credibility of Pajamas Media's little project.