We already mentioned that People For was taking out a full page ad in the New York Times.  Well, today it ran, and it's pretty cool.  The psuedo scandal seems to be getting a bit less media attention at the moment, but that doesn't mean that the right wing's campaign to supress the vote has gotten any less dangerous.

Anway, here's Laura holding the paper.  We're think it turned out pretty well!

Answer: They don't actually exist -- except in the minds of right-wingers. (Well, I'm not actually sure if Pat Robertson and the like believe in unicorns or the Tooth Fairy, but given the outlandish nature of some of their other beliefs, I wouldn't really be surprised.)

Chris Hayes breaks down the non-problem of voter fraud in a great post on The Nation's blog about how he "voter fraud" -- emphasis on the scare quotes -- is a problem that doesn't actually exist:

Every two years, Republicans gin up baseless accusations of "voter fraud," often directed at ACORN. The strategic imperative is simple: create a pretense that will allow them to more credibly hassle and hopefully suppress poor and minority voters.

Just to get this out of the way: in the real world, there is no such thing as voter fraud. There will be roughly as many fraudulent votes cast in this election as there were stockpiles of biological weapons in Iraq. That is to say, none.

Read the whole thing here.

Anyone who watched last night’s debate should know that John McCain and his right-wing allies are going to outrageous lengths to smear the reputation of ACORN, a community organizing group which has registered hundreds of thousands of voters for the coming election. But many in the media – especially at Fox News and CNN – have failed the public.

People For the American Way is running a full-age ad (see below) in the New York Times in the coming days to call out the right-wing smears and the failure by many in the press to report the full story.

The truth is that there is no voter fraud problem. This is what the top election experts have consistently concluded. When Karl Rove aggressively pushed the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute voter fraud, they came up empty-handed. But all we seem to hear about from Fox and CNN is that Mickey Mouse was registered to vote.

There are already systems in place to catch petty voter registration fraud. It should be a non-issue. Meanwhile McCain and the RNC are using a handful of negligible but colorful examples to distract from the organized disenfranchisement of thousands, perhaps millions, of legally registered voters through so-called ballot security measures.

Learn more about those efforts here, read more about our ad here, and check out the ad here.

Seems ACORN isn't the only organization that's had trouble with contractors submitting fraudulent voter registrations.

Via Firedoglake:

Faked names on voter registration forms. Error rates as high as 60 percent. Firing the people responsible for these errors. Investigations launched by local and state police. Sound familiar? This is not ACORN in the 2008 election's final days.

This is the California Republican Party and its contractors in 2006, when the same problems that are now dogging ACORN and providing political fodder for GOP attacks plagued an effort by California Republicans to register 750,000 people.

The details were all spelled out in a series of Los Angeles Times stories, which quoted former California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres saying these kinds of errors are inevitable "when you use private vendors." Even the state's top election official in 2006, Republican Bruce McPherson, was forced to investigate his own party's actions.

Drew mentioned earlier today that "voter fraud is an almost entirely synthetic issue, cooked up as an excuse to push restrictive voter ID laws."  One of the chefs: Karl Rove. (I'm sure you're shocked!) 

Via Talking Points Memo comes a video from last year in which Rove talks about voter fraud being "a real problem" that's "not going away":

And did you know that all this is tied to the U.S. attorney firing scandal that came to light last year? Of several districts where Rove claims rampant fraud is taking place, three were districts in which U.S. attorneys got in trouble with the White House — and were subsequently fired — for not bringing enough prosecutions over voter fraud.

Fraud which, as the Brennan Center for Justice has found, "is actually less likely to occur than lightning striking a person."

Ezra Klein points out how the right is using the ACORN pseudo-scandal to undermine the Obama presidency – before the election has even taken place.

Having (possibly? momentarily?) decided to back away from the anti-Obama character attacks that we thought we'd see over the last weeks of the campaign, the McCain campaign is now pushing the idea that the race is going to decided by voter fraud committed by the voter registration group ACORN.

To use a favorite word of a certain vice presidential candidate, that's pure malarkey.

As People For has often pointed out in the past, voter fraud is an almost entirely synthetic issue, cooked up as an excuse to push restrictive voter ID laws. (Voter ID laws, of course, lower turnout among communities of color, the elderly, students, and working class voters.)

In response to the accusations, ACORN has created a useful fact sheet which contains some surprisingly interesting information.

Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.

Fact: ACORN flags in writing incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in. Unfortunately, some of these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards. In many cases, we can actually prove that these are the same cards we called to their attention.