Pwned!

Andrew Breitbart may be gone, but Breitbart's legacy lives on. Investigative journalist and serial annoyance to the political left James O'Keefe has a classic new video up examining voter fraud. In it, he goes into a polling booth, gives the name and address of Attorney General Eric Holder, and is offered Holder's ballot. Naturally, they then intersperse this with interviews with Eric Holder where he claims that voter fraud isn't a problem.

Check it out - Comedy gold!

The Department of Justice is spinning like crazy on this one - the current line is the following:

“It’s no coincidence that these so-called examples of rampant voter fraud consistently turn out to be manufactured ones."

You tested this new heart attack medication in a manufactured, controlled environment! That tells us nothing about how the drugs will work in the real world!

Which of course misses the point entirely - the video doesn't show the prevalence of voter fraud at all. It simply shows how trivially easy it is to implement. Whether it happens a lot or a little isn't clear from the video. Truthfully, it's probably not a huge effect. But it's not trivial either, and it might matter in close elections.

In terms of the dog that did not bark though, my initial thought was 'you mean they haven't charged O'Keefe with voter fraud based on the video?'. This would be exactly the kind of politically nasty 'shoot the messenger' approach I'd expect.

But then you watch the video carefully, and see that O'Keefe has learned his lesson from his earlier arrest - at no point does he actually make any misrepresentations about who he is. Listen to how he phrases his question:

O'Keefe: "Do you have an Eric Holder, Address [redacted in video]?

Poll Worker: "H-O-L-T-E-R or -D-E ?"

O'Keefe: "H-O-L-D-E-R . That's the name."

Clever. He deliberately avoids claiming at any point that he is Eric Holder, but they are willing to him the ballot anyway. He doesn't sign his name to anything, he doesn't take a ballot. I imagine a Big Government lawyer probably vetted the whole formulation quite carefully. He's not giving them anything to pin on him.

I remember Tim Blair pointing out back in 2008 that you didn't need ID to vote for Barack Obama, but you did need ID to attend the Barack Obama election night celebration party in Millennium Park. Seems like a funny ordering of priorities to me.