As President Obama spoke about Representative Paul Ryan’s budget yesterday, Fox News broke away from the president’s remarks to cover “a stunning case in South Bend, Indiana.” The story covered an indictment by the St. Joseph County prosecutor’s office alleging that local Democratic officials forged signatures to get Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards on the Indiana Democratic Primary ballot in 2008. “Indiana State Police investigators identified a total of 22 petitions that appeared to be faked, yet sailed through the Voter Registration Board as legitimate documents,” Fox reported. Eric Shawn, of the Fox News Voter Fraud Unit, said that a local election worker was “ordered to forge presidential petitions for Barack Obama, illegally faking the names and signatures of unsuspecting voters to put the then-Illinois senator on the presidential primary ballot.”

Number one: there’s no evidence that the alleged forgeries played a decisive role in getting the Democratic candidates on the Indiana ballot in 2008 or determining the outcome of the primary or general election. [...] Number two: Indiana’s voter ID law, passed in 2008 and the model for the nine states that have adopted similar laws since the 2010 election, did nothing to prevent the alleged signature fraud, nor did it stop Indiana’s Republican Secretary of State, Charlie White, from committing felony voter fraud in the 2010 election. (White was sentenced to a year of home detention on felony fraud convictions.)

Always on top of the ongoing threat to representative democracy posed by Republican office-holders,Ari Berman caught a telling moment from FOX News:Of course, FOX News interrupted a speech by President Obama with a story that, however shaky it will undoubtedly prove to be, suggests that he was not legitimately elected. This indictment, as Berman notes, is already being used by conservative commentators to scream for more voter suppression laws nationally. There are a couple of problems with that, however.(Ever notice that an awful lot of the true voter fraud that occurs is done by Republicans?)

Beyond the problems Berman notes with the Republican argument, petition signatures are not votes, and there is no evidence in Indiana that rampant voter fraud occurred in 2008. Just as there is no evidence anywhere that rampant voter fraud happened in any state in 2008, or in 2004, or in 2000.



Indeed, between 2000 and 2007, there were 32,299 UFO sightings in the United States, 352 deaths caused by lightning, but only nine cases of voter impersonation, according to a great new infographic by Craiglist founder Craig Newmark.

For more of the week's news, make the jump below the fold.