Conservative media fixture James O’Keefe rose to stardom in 2009 after posting an undercover video supposedly showing employees of the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) agreeing to help him smuggle underage prostitutes into the US. The video circulated widely in the conservative blogosphere, where activists saw the clip as proof that ACORN, a major force in community organizing and voter registration drives, was corrupt. O’Keefe’s sting destroyed ACORN’s reputation and the employee, Juan Carlos Vera, was fired.

Only later did it come to light that Vera called the police to report O’Keefe after he left. Four years after the video went viral, O’Keefe has agreed to pay a $100,000 settlement to Vera, as first reported by Wonkette.

By filming Vera, O’Keefe may have violated a state law against secret recordings of an individual’s voice and image. Though he was granted immunity from criminal prosecution after turning over the raw videos to the California attorney general’s office, Vera and other ACORN employees sued O’Keefe privately:

In the settlement, O’Keefe says that before the video was shown on TV or posted on the Web, he was unaware of Vera’s assertion that he had called the police to report O’Keefe and Giles for proposing an illegal act. [...] The lawsuit was filed on the assertion that O’Keefe broke a state law prohibiting the surreptitious recording of someone’s voice and image.

O’Keefe’s other videos have been exposed as either complete lies or deceptively edited. ThinkProgress reported last year that O’Keefe’s attempt to expose voter fraud by non-citizens actually featured US citizens. The conservative activist has also been arrested for trying to bug a Senator’s phone. In his ACORN pimp sting, O’Keefe deceptively edited in the famous pimp costume later, though he actually wore a suit and tie at the ACORN office.

O’Keefe’s settlement is the latest blow to the credibility of conservative media. Breitbart.com made a stir by accusing now-confirmed Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel of taking money from a shadowy organization with the outlandish name “Friends of Hamas” — a group that turned out to be fictional. Soon after, allegations by the Daily Caller that Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) had hired a prostitute turned out to be entirely fabricated. The fake scandal had also been shopped around to the New York Post and the Star-Ledger Time, but neither could find any evidence to publish the story. Larger conservative media outlets like the Drudge Report, however, enthusiastically amplified these stories with little or no scrutiny.

Despite the payment, O’Keefe is refusing to back down. In a statement, he absolves himself of any liability, saying, “The settlement admits no liability and there is no benefit from extending this ridiculous lawsuit…Sadly, this is the cost of exposing the truth.”

I find that an awful lot of problems are caused by people’s inability to understand things like error rates and big numbers. If a pharmaceutical company came out with a new anti-depression drug and gave it to a million people suffering from depression, of whom 970,000 were helped you wouldn’t turn around and conclude that the company was perpetrating a deliberate fraud based on the fact that “tens of thousands” of patients got no relief. You’d say that the medicine was helpful in 97 percent of the indicated cases. ACORN is trying — and succeeding — in an effort to register a lot of new voters.

There’s simply no way to gather over one million new voter registration forms without some of the forms having been filled out with bogus information. You could ask the group to automatically toss out the obviously wrong ones — some guy saying he’s Tony Romo, someone else saying he’s Mickey Mouse — but the law requires them to hand all the forms in to prevent them from tossing out forms filled out by people who say they want to register Republican. Consequently, if you go out and register over a million voters you’ll wind up with a lot of bad forms being submitted. But just as 30,000 is a lot of people and also only a very small fraction of one million people, when you’re talking about registering over a million new voters you’d need orders of magnitude more bad forms to constitute real evidence of a systematic fraud campaign.

Meanwhile, if you want to reduce the number of bad forms submitted, you have basically three options:

1. Make voter registration much easier and more automatic so as to reduce the need for registration drives.
2. Let registration organizers toss out forms.
3. Stop all registration drives by conflating good faith errors with systematic, criminal fraud.

Conservatives like option (3) because they don’t like it when large numbers of people vote. And that’s what this is about, finding a backdoor way to delegitimize all efforts at large-scale registration drives. It’d be as if instead of trying to ban computers (obviously impossible) you passed a law saying you could throw someone in jail for selling a computer that’s prone to crashing. It’s computer sales fraud — the thing’s supposed to work! Well, nobody knows how to build a crash-free computer so, bye bye computer industry.