Fox's South Carolina 900 "Dead Voters" Story Collapses

[NNN0LHI]

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201201250011

January 25, 2012 1:31 pm ET by Matt Gertz

Over the last two weeks, Fox has repeatedly promoted the claim that voter fraud is indicated by records showing that more than 900 South Carolina residents were recorded as casting a vote after their reported death date. Lou Dobbs, Bill Hemmer, and Neil Cavuto all gave state Attorney General Alan Wilson a platform to offer up this assertion, and on Monday Bret Baier reported that Wilson had notified the Justice Department of this "potential voter fraud."

These claims were always shaky, and have now completely dissolved.

On January 11, state Department of Motor Vehicles director Kevin Schwedo testified before the state legislature that his analysts had compared state Election Commission records with data from the Department of Vital Statistics and the Social Security Administration and found 957 people who could have voted after they had died. He subsequently turned the data over to law enforcement.

But the Columbia Free-Times' Corey Hutchins reports that the Election Commission has examined six names from the list -- the only six names Wilson's office had turned over. At a hearing this morning, the agency revealed that none of those cases involved a ballot actually being cast in a deceased person's name:

[trueblue2007]

1. that is because... the DEAD VOTERS story is a lie

teabaggers always lie. there is no truth to the voter fraud stories. it's an internet hoax story

[Ellipsis]

2. yah... voter fraud

Kevin Schwedo, director of the Department of Motor Vehicles, looked at the data and said he found 37,295 cases in which the person was listed as dead. Of that number, he said, 957 voted in “recent elections.”

If 957 people went around pretending to be a dead person in order to cast a ballot, that’s fraud. But it’s a tiny problem–such a minute percentage of the state’s 2,495,000 registered voters that it’s not even worth calculating. It’s not in the same space-time-continuum as the potential disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters. And yes I know there was an 8 vote margin in the Iowa caucuses.

But we don’t know enough about Mr. Schwedo’s statement to even reach that conclusion. Mr. Schwedo testified in the state legislature the other day that he did not know how long a period the data covered – just that it was “recent elections.” So it could have been 957 people in the last election, or the last 10 elections.

And, to compound the problem, no one even knows if those people are actually dead, or if they’re just listed as dead in state records, which everyone seems to admit are in a terrible state. The solution here is better record keeping and regular purging of voter rolls.


http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/dead-voters-in-south-carolina-maybe-maybe-not/

[yellowcanine]

3. So someone should own up to recklessly promoting a false claim of voter fraud and resign.

[Earth_First]

4. 120% bullsh*t

[Tx4obama]

5. Lots of details regarding the issue and hearing on the link below

Here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10169954