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.