There is no evidence of any non-trivial number of people casting fraudulent ballots. Given that reality, I find it remarkable that allegations of “voter fraud” each and every year manage to get a non-trivial quantity of press coverage. But Jay Nordlinger thinks the press ignores these stories and that America will only stand up and demand a stop to fraud that isn’t happening when the media starts doing its job and covering fraud that isn’t happening:

Do you remember when the Gore people handed cartons of cigarettes to homeless people, to entice them to the polls, or register Democratic, or whatever? We righties had a lot of fun with that — because Gore was Mr. Anti-Tobacco, you’ll recall. (That’s before he went Global Warming.) But it takes more than righties having fun — it takes the big people saying, “This is a story.”

If it’s true that Al Gore’s campaign staff was giving homeless people cigarettes in order to entice them to go vote, that would indeed be funny because Gore was Mr. Anti-Tobacco. On the other hand, it would be strange for the press to give widespread coverage to these instances of election fraud given that it’s not election fraud. For the press to provide widespread coverage of people voting illegally, there would need to be instances of people voting illegally. Nordlinger, even amidst whining that the press isn’t covering fraud, can’t produce an example of fraud for people to cover. Just as when the Bush Justice Department brought inappropriate and illegal political pressure to bear on US Attorneys across the country to investigate voter fraud, they could barely come up with anything to investigate. It just doesn’t happen. Among other things, the secret ballot makes it a little impractical to bribe people to vote for your candidate.

Like some kind of elaborate striptease, the McCain campaign, having already flashed its Ayers, is now hinting that they’ll show us the full Wright. I hope they get on with it already!

But I find the idea that they’ve been holding back from this out of a sense of virtue a little non-credible. Rather, they presumably haven’t been talking about Jeremiah Wright because it’s not clear what they’re going to say about it. When Hillary Clinton brought this up, her main point was that (a) this was an electoral vulnerability that the Republicans would exploit and (b) Obama didn’t have a track-record in big-time politics that showed he could handle the attacks. Neither of those, however, can actually be the point of a McCain attack. With, say, Willie Horton, the point was that Dukakis was soft on crime. With Wright the point is . . . what? Maybe I just lack imagination. But McCain is paddling up river at this point, with everything we know about American politics suggesting that the deterioration of the economic situation makes it hard for him to win. At a minimum I would think that any spectacular campaign gambit would have to somehow connect to some point about the economic situation.

Bring up the fact that trying to fund the federal government through a retail sales tax is a bad idea, and soon enough folks will pop up arguing that a VAT (value added tax) works in Europe and is arguably a good idea. And, indeed, that’s true. But they’re not the same thing. A VAT is what you come up with if you want to accomplish the goals of raising large sums of revenue through a consumption tax and you also know what you’re talking about.

My opinion on the merits of a VAT is as follows. A VAT is regressive, which I don’t like. But in many countries they raise a ton of money from a mildly regressive VAT and then spend the money on programs that are strongly progressive. This, to me, is fine — progressive taxes shouldn’t be a sacred cow, the point is to have an overall progressive system of economic interventions. So if you’re talking about a VAT to replace income tax revenue, I’m not so excited. But raising new money through a VAT and spending it on progressive programming seems like a fine idea to me if that turns out to be easier to accomplish politically than the alternatives.

From a reader via IM:

Hey, speaking of voter fraud, i keep getting mailings and phone calls from the Wisconsin GOP telling me that i need to register to vote and then vote. Even though I have not lived in Wisconsin since I graduated high school there in 1997. I have never had a residence there since then. But, according to the Wisconsin GOP, that didn’t matter. Of course, I implied to them I was thinking about voting McCain. Yet, if ACORN told me the same thing……….

I asked them on the phone call if I could register to vote there even though I have not lived in the state since 1997, and they said “no problem.” After telling them I was a likely mccain voter, which of course, I am not.

Now of course part of this story is that if we had a National Popular Vote it wouldn’t matter so much exactly where people vote.

Chris Hayes commits some.

In a reasonable country, what we would have is an affirmative right of adult citizens to vote. Then “fraud” would consist of voting multiple times, or voting someplace where you’re clearly ineligible to vote. Currently, there is no affirmative right to vote. Consequently, any violation of any number of picayune technical elements of process counts, in some sense, as fraud. Filling out a registration form wrong by accident is, arguably, fraud. Or if you’re a college student and your freshman dorm is in a different precinct from your sophomore dorm, but you forgot to get your registration information updated before the deadline so you go vote in the precinct where you’re registered that’s arguably fraud. So all this stuff happens, and there’s a lot of fraud. Or, rather, “fraud.” It’s clerical errors, really, but conservatives are trying to make it out to be some vast election-stealing conspiracy.