Republicans have lately been busy pushing a manufactured fallacy that there is rampant, in-person voter fraud destroying fair elections across America. Of course, they haven’t put forth any evidence of it, but they are pushing nonetheless. They held a hearing in the House last week that was brimming with emptiness and misinformation. And they have retained their personal PR machine – aka Fox News – in the effort.

Now, just when you thought that the GOP/Fox News racket was already so far gone that reality for them was a distant memory, they dispatch their inbred cousins at Fox Nation to dispense a story that is rooted in nothing but a frantic illusion.

Let’s set aside the irony that Fox is now fronting for allegations emanating from Wikileaks, an enterprise they have previously discounted as disreputable and even traitorous. More troubling is that they have utterly misunderstood the data Wikileaks has released. The data at issue is emails that were acquired through the hacking of the secretive, private intelligence firm Stratfor. In particular there was an email from one Stratfor executive to another that Fox is alleging reveals vote tampering on the part of Democrats in the 2008 election. However, that is not what the email says:

“The black Dems were caught stuffing the ballot boxes in Philly and Ohio as reported the night of the election and Sen. McCain chose not to fight. The matter is not dead inside the party. It now becomes a matter of sequence now as to how and when to ‘out.'”

Clearly the email states the alleged tampering was “reported the night of the election.” So that is not the revelation. If anything is considered newsworthy here it is whether the McCain camp chose to make an issue of news that was already known. But even that is dubious in that there are no reports I can find of any vote tampering in Ohio or Philadelphia post-2008 at all. So this may just be some wild speculation between a couple of private, right-wing spooks upset that their guy lost. It is certainly not evidence of anything by any stretch of the imagination. Where are the “black dems” who were supposedly caught? None of that, however, stopped the Fox Nationalists from publishing the questioning headline above at the top of their web site.

To compound the fabricated propaganda, Fox also posted a story alleging “Massive Voter Fraud Uncovered in Virginia.” And once again, the story was a phony piece of hyper-sensationalized nonsense. Fox was attempting to portray the news as proof of voter fraud that would justify enacting discriminatory voter ID laws. Had any of Fox Nation’s glassy-eyed readers bothered to click through the deceitful headline to the source article, they would have read this:

“The majority of cases reviewed by The Times-Dispatch that resulted in arrests in central Virginia involved felons who either illegally registered to vote or who illegally voted in the general election, or both. Felons cannot vote in Virginia unless their rights are restored by the governor.

“None of the cases appeared to involve someone who misrepresented his or her identity at the polls to vote.“

That’s right, none of the cases would have been prevented had there been strict requirements for photo IDs that disenfranchise thousands of legitimate voters. The article explains that prospective voters were told by registration collectors that their felony status would not impair their voting privileges. So this appears not to be a case of voter fraud at all, but a case of registration errors wherein the voter was doing what they believed to be proper. The person registering the voter may be guilty of something if they made knowing misrepresentations to the registrant. But in either case, the proposed voter ID laws would not have prevented any ineligible votes because the voter would have presented their own ID and would have been permitted to cast a ballot.

Laws already exist that address the legal conduct of voting registration agents and, as this case demonstrates, they are being enforced. There are also procedures in place to purge ineligible voters from voting rolls (i.e. felons), and they can be enhanced by new technologies to become more accurate and efficient.

This is another example of an allegation of massive voter fraud that failed to verify any such claim. This embarrassing dishonesty follows a special report on Fox News this weekend titled ‘Fox News Reporting: Stealing Your Vote.” As an analysis by Media Matters shows, there were no certified incidents in the entire hour long program of any votes being stolen that could have been prevented by new voter ID laws.

For a problem that Fox and Republicans are trying so hard to build into a nationwide crisis, they are having an awfully difficult time of coming up with even a sliver of evidence. And of course the reason is that there is none. Their only aim is to hype the phony controversy so that they can get laws passed that will prevent thousands of mostly Democratic voters from being able to exercise their right to vote. This is a despicable campaign by a political party and their media accomplice to subvert democracy and dishonestly gain control of government that they otherwise cannot win fairly.