James O’Keefe and his supporters think that he’s scored big today. See, not long ago, Attorney General Eric Holder criticized laws that require people wishing to vote to bring photo I.D. with them; he called those laws “a solution in search of a problem,” and said “there is no statistical proof that vote fraud is a big concern in this country.” So one of O’Keefe’s colleagues—a white man who looks considerably younger than the Attorney General—went to went to Holder’s polling place for the recent primary in Washington, D.C., and claimed to be Holder. The punch line, of course, is that he was given no trouble, and welcomed to vote. (He never went through with it and actually committed the voter fraud, presumably because someone’s giving them legal advice not to.)

It’s a cute little trick, and a lot of people on the right have gotten a nice little laugh at Eric Holder’s expense today. The Drudge Report has led with it all day. But it doesn’t prove anything—actually, if anything, it shows just how limited O’Keefe’s talents are, and how un-ambitious is the vision espoused by the right’s new investigative journalists and those who publish them.

The Department of Justice responded to the video by dismissing it: “About the only time we get concrete evidence of voter fraud is when someone pulls a stunt like this,” an anonymous D.O.J. official told NBC’s First Read blog. Talking Points Memo quoted another anonymous D.O.J. official—or perhaps the same one—as saying, “It’s no coincidence that these so-called examples of rampant voter fraud consistently turn out to be manufactured ones.” That set off Ben Shapiro, who’s the editor-at-large of Breitbart.com, the Web site that published O’Keefe’s video.

“This is nonsensical,” Shapiro wrote. “Obviously this wasn’t an actual case of voter fraud—O’Keefe and Project Veritas didn’t want to break the law. And obviously the situation is manufactured—it’s the only way to show that voter fraud is easy and plausible, since we presumably don’t know when voter fraud takes place.”

Well, no. Shapiro and O’Keefe and the rest don’t know when voter fraud takes place, if indeed it does, because they don’t do the work necessary to find out. O’Keefe may be lionized as an investigative journalist, but he’s not one, and he never has been. He takes the easy, flashy way out: his videos don’t prove that malfeasance is happening; they prove that it could, maybe. (Taking the same trick and repeating it over and over again, which is basically what O’Keefe did with this latest video, part of a series of such work, doesn’t help.)

Investigative journalism—the real thing, the kind that discovers the dirt people are actually doing, rather than that they could potentially do—is hard work, and it can be boring. You want to expose systematic voter fraud? Get a bunch of records, pore through them for a few hundred hours. Get some sources, interview them. Double back and check what they told you, see whether it’s true, and where it might lead. (If Bart and Lisa Simpson can do it, so can you.) And be prepared to do months of work that ends up not producing anything of value. Do that, and come up with something good, and then we can talk about voter fraud.