South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson was spotted at a sparsely attended event and fundraiser with conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe on Tuesday, raising questions about whether the state’s top law enforcement official should be helping raise money for someone who appears to have committed voter fraud.

O’Keefe’s latest round of videos, where his band of actors succeed in claiming ballots belonging to well known figures like NAACP President Benjamin Jealous and HBO comedian Bill Maher, was gleefully distributed around the right-wing echo chamber, but even O’Keefe seemed to acknowledge on Tuesday the videos didn’t reveal much:

O’Keefe told the gathering he intends to make more videos, in which he pledged to “actually catch voter fraud as it actually happens.”

“We plan to actually catch non-citizens voting,” O’Keefe said, but he didn’t say where or when he thought that might happen.

O’Keefe is thought of in conservative circles as some kind of investigative reporter. In fact, O’Keefe’s recent gimmick, sending agents to pose as registered voters in primary elections around the country, has succeeded only in creating the kind of problem that he seeks to expose. As has been thoroughly documented, despite the right’s insistence that voter fraud is a widespread problem, a voter is more likely to get hit by a bolt of lightning on his or her way to the polling place than to commit voter fraud.

AG Wilson’s support for voter ID laws is not new. In January, Wilson leapt into action when it was brought to his attention that 900 dead South Carolinians had supposedly shown up to vote. The investigation that he ordered though turned up exactly zero cases of voter fraud. Undeterred, Wilson continued to insist that the threat of zombie voters was so great as to warrant the passage of discriminatory voter ID laws that succeed only in disenfranchising lower income, younger, and elderly voters.

South Carolina elections are still free of dead voters.

That’s what the State Election Commission concluded from its investigation into South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson’s declaration that over 900 dead people may have voted in recent elections.

Though the charge itself is laughable, South Carolina was still compelled to devote taxpayer money to investigate whether their elections had indeed been tainted by zombie voters. Unsurprisingly, they uncovered no evidence of voter fraud:

The State Election Commission said Thursday that 95 percent of the 207 allegedly dead people who voted in the 2010 general election either were alive and cast ballots legally or did not vote. [...]

Of its review of the 207 contested votes cast in 2010, the commission found:

• 106 votes were clerical errors by poll workers – mistakes like marking John Doe Sr. instead of John Doe Jr.

• 56 votes were “bad data matching” – meaning the state Department of Motor Vehicles, which raised concerns about zombie voters, was wrong in assuming the voters were dead.

• 32 votes were “voter participation errors,” meaning someone was credited as voting in an election when they did not, most likely because of a stray mark on the voter rolls that was electronically scanned to record a voter’s participation.

• Three ballots were cast absentee by voters who died before Election Day.

In the other five percent of cases, there wasn’t enough information to determine an explanation, though still no evidence for fraud.

When Wilson first leveled the charge, many conservative media outlets, from Human Events to Fox News to Weasel Zippers and others, jumped on the story, using it as justification for South Carolina’s discriminatory voter ID law. Now, four days after the State Election Commission released its initial findings, none of these organizations have ran an update or correction, much less a full story informing their readers that “dead voters” in South Carolina still don’t exist.

That’s the major problem with Scooby-Doo accusations like “dead voters”: the investigation is sexy, but the finale is always far more mundane. As ThinkProgress wrote earlier this month, “when the allegations are inevitably shown to be false, far fewer news outlets follow up.” As a result, many people are still left with the mistaken impression that dead voters tainted South Carolina’s recent elections.

Last year, the Florida legislature passed a bill enacting requirements for groups conducting voter registration drives so onerous that even the League of Women Voters were forced to pull out of the state. Sensible individuals would see this episode as a cautionary tale. South Carolina legislators view it instead as a how-to guide.

This week, the South Carolina House will consider HB 4549, a bill that mimics Florida’s changes to its voter registration laws. Among the changes contained in the bill is a new requirement that voter registration groups must submit registration applications within 48 hours of completion or face a fine of up to $1,000 per application. It has already been approved by the House Judiciary Committee and faces good prospects in the overall House, which Republicans control 76-48.

A similar 48-hour requirement is precisely what forced the League of Women Voters out of the Sunshine State. Now, the same could happen in South Carolina.

HB 4549 “would make it very difficult for the LWV to register voters in South Carolina,” Barbara Zia, co-president of the League of Women Voters of South Carolina told ThinkProgress. If it’s passed in its present form, Zia said, “the League could not afford the liability and risk that it would entail to continue registering voters in South Carolina.”

Voter registration drives disproportionately benefit minorities and low-income communities. Last election cycle, black voters were four times as likely as white voters to register via a registration drive.

South Carolina is already hurting in the voter turnout arena. In 2010, the state ranked just 36th in turnout. If the legislature succeeds in passing these new restrictions, that ranking will surely drop further.

Earlier this month, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson (R) set off alarms by claiming there was evidence that over 900 dead people had voted in his state’s recent elections. The charge has since been echoed in a wide array of media outlets, nowhere more prominently than Fox News.

Although the state has not disclosed the names of the 900 zombies who allegedly showed up at the polls, Wilson did provide six names which he claims are on the list. Yet a preliminary review of these six by the South Carolina State Election Commission reveals six far more innocent explanations (bolds are ours):

• One was an absentee ballot cast by a voter who then died before election day;
• Another was the result of an error by a poll worker who mistakenly marked the voter as Samuel Ferguson, Jr. when the voter was in fact Samuel Ferguson, III;
• Two were the result of stray marks on the voter registration list detected by the scanner – again, a clerical error;
• The final two were the result of poll managers incorrectly marking the name of the voter in question instead of the voter listed either above or below on the list.

When ThinkProgress wrote about Wilson’s charge two and a half weeks ago, we noted that nearly every time someone makes dead voter allegations, the culprit ends up being “a spelling error, a check-in error, or simply a death shortly after Election Day.” Indeed, clerical errors and a death close to Election Day is precisely what happened in Abbeville County, not voting from the grave.

Though Fox News ran multiple segments hyping the allegations that dead people had tainted South Carolina’s elections, a preliminary review shows that the cable station has yet to report on the State Election Commission’s review debunking Wilson’s charge.

In many ways, this is the major problem: “dead voter” claims are sexy, getting reported far and wide nearly every election. Yet when the allegations are inevitably shown to be false, far fewer news outlets follow up. As a result, many people never learn that dead voters didn’t taint South Carolina’s recent elections.

Every few years, officials undertake the same Scooby Doo-routine, claiming to have uncovered damning evidence of dead voters, only to ultimately conclude that simpler explanations account for the inconsistencies. Just like Maryland and California in 1994, Georgia in 1998, or New Hampshire in 2004, South Carolina is the latest state to put on the “dead voter” Kabuki performance.

South Carolina raced to be among the first GOP-led states to pass a radical voter ID bill that stands to disenfranchise “nearly 180,000 voters” in the state, “most of whom are elderly, student, minority or low income voters.” Indeed, the Associated Press found that the law hits majority-black precincts the hardest as “the percentage of minority voters without the right identification is higher in those areas than other precincts statewide.”

But apparently, requiring a photo ID to cast a vote is not enough proof of eligibility for state legislators. Now, they’re considering a bill that requires proof of citizenship to register to vote:

South Carolina legislators want to require more proof of citizenship when people want to register to vote under legislation a panel plans to discuss.

A Senate Judiciary subcommittee plans to take up a bill Thursday that says citizenship proof can come from documents that include a driver’s license, birth certificate, United States passport or tribal identification.

Proof of citizenship may seem like an intuitive requirement for voter registration. However, a requirement to provide a driver’s license or birth certificate will impair voter registration drives, especially when people may not readily have that identification on hand. Coupled with the voter ID law, this requirement will serve to disproportionately disenfranchise minorities in the state.

The current voter ID law isn’t even legal, and it was blocked by the Department of Justice for leaving South Carolina’s non-white voters “significantly burdened” in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The VRA requires voter laws in states that have a long history of discrimination to be “precleared” by DOJ or a federal court in DC before they may take effect. Instead of assuring that the photo ID law doesn’t violate basic civic rights of their constituents, these legislators are hoping to further suppress voting rights by making it more difficult to even register, let alone vote.

Several other states are picking up the 2011 anti-voter trend and seeking to implement their own voter ID laws. Despite repeated failure to impose one in the past, Missouri is pushing through a voter ID bill despite the fact that “no one testified in favor” of it. Iowa’s Republican secretary of state also plans to unveil a new voter ID bill as well.