The right-wing media likes to pretend that voter fraud is a serious problem and that we need to pass laws requiring voters to present picture identification to combat it, even though such laws could disenfranchise millions of Americans. Fox News even has a hotline to allow viewers to report voter fraud to the network. But their campaign is quickly falling apart.
Today, Fox News senior national correspondent John Roberts reported that the Republican Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann is supporting a referendum in Mississippi aimed at requiring voters to present photo ID, but also reported that Hosemann “admits that there's not a whole lot of voter fraud that he's aware of in Mississippi.”
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This is the latest in a line of admissions by right-wing activists and media figures that there is not a major voter fraud problem in this country.
Discussing voter fraud, Fox News host Megyn Kelly said the following last week: “Well, but there have been some instances, but you're right it's not overwhelming.”
And just last month, right-wing commentator Hans von Spakovsky, a strong proponent of voter ID laws, acknowledged that there is no “massive fraud in American elections.”
People who have studied the issue agree with Hosemann, Kelly, and von Spakovsky that there is no widespread problem of the type of voter fraud that photo ID laws are meant to curb.
But so far none of this has not stopped the right-wing media from hyping voter ID laws or the fraud those laws supposedly counteract.