The Blame Acorn Game
By Peter Dreier and John Atlas break it down.
In her own excellent article on the subject, Dahlia Lithwick has some good analysis of John Paul Stevens’s unfortunate endorsement of the vote fraud fraud earlier this year:
In the end, all roads lead back to John Paul Stevens. He wrote the plurality opinion in last term’s Crawford v. Marion County, which upheld Indiana’s restrictive voter-ID law. Stevens understood that there is no such thing as polling-place vote fraud, conceding that “[t]he record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history.” But, continued Stevens, in the manner of someone rationally discussing the likelihood of UFO sightings, “flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this nation’s history.” Like, um, an 1868 mayoral election in New York City, he notes, and a single 2004 incident from Washington. Stevens was more worried about shaky “voter confidence” in elections than actual voting. The message that went out from on high was clear: undermine voter confidence. Even if it’s irrational and hysterical and tinged with the worst kinds of racism, keep telling the voters the system is busted.
Each time they spread the word that Democrats (especially poor and minority Democrats) are poised to steal an election, John McCain and his overheated friends deliberately undermine voter confidence.
It’s a great scam; use apocryphal stories of “voter fraud” to create a pretext for further vote suppression, and the Supreme Court will actually cite the completely unfounded fears you’ve created as a justification! Even granting that Stevens was trying to keep the possibility that some vote suppression method might be held unconstitutional in the future, once you’ve accepted “voter confidence” as a valid reason it’s not clear what will ever fail the test…