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A hearing today in South Carolina proved that the Fox News touted dead zombie rush for the polls in South Carolina is nothing but a myth!

Yes, hard as it is to believe, 950 dead people did not rise from their graves to vote illegally in South Carolina. That’s right. Zero dead people, no Mickey Mouse, no illegal immigrants and no pimps! Where is James O’Keefe when you need him?

Republican Rep. Alan Clemons spoke these solemn words before today’s hearing, “We must have certainty in South Carolina that zombies aren’t voting.”

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And so we must! Wanna guess how many dead people actually voted? Drum roll please.

Zero.

Well, one, if you count the guy who died after sending in his absentee ballot.

Don’t blame the Foxpublicans for being scared of zombies. Governor Haley appointee and director of the S.C. Department of Motor Vehicles Kevin Shwedo sounded the alarm bell over the 950 dead people voting. So concerned was Kevin that he rushed to turn over his suspicions to the Attorney General, though he did note (and Fox left out) that many of these 957 names of dead people could be the result of clerical errors and voting rolls that weren’t up to date.

Naturally, the South Carolina Attorney General was thrilled by this, as he had already been on Fox News to declare that not 957 dead people, but 37,000 dead people had voting rights in South Carolina! Alan Wilson told FOX’s Megyn Kelly, “What I do know is, is that the Justice Department’s decision to strike down this law under the Voting Rights Act has preserved the voting rights of 37,000 dead people.”

Nothing makes a South Carolinian Republican happier than ginning up some hate at justice, so Wilson took to Fox News again to beat that fear drum about the zombies voting, completely ignoring that his state is already on a special watch requiring pre clearance for having used voting laws to disenfranchise minorities in the past.

On January 12 of this year, Wilson was on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, to declare incorrectly, “When we were going through the process of getting this law precleared with the Department of Justice, we provided numbers that showed that this would have a minimal effect on minority voters, the elderly, and of course opponents of this bill said that this is trying, this is in search of a problem that doesn’t exist. Well, subsequently, we found out that there were over 900 people who died and then subsequently voted. That number could be even higher than that, Bill. So this is just an example.”

Or rather, since Wilson and Haley are behind the push back against the Department of Justice’s denial of their petition to disenfranchise minority voters – er, voter ID laws that the Justice Department feels will disenfranchise minority voters – Wilson is not ignoring the chastisement South Carolina already received, but rather petulantly doing anything possible to get daddy Justice to change his mind.

Wislon was so jonesing to prove President Obama’s mean Department of Justice wrong that he rushed to TV with his accusations long before he knew if they were in fact true. Or, more precisely, before anyone else knew that they were not true.

Inquiries followed which resulted in the hearing today.

However, instead of providing 950 names of zombie voters, the election commission was only given 6 names. Of those six names, not one of them turned out to be a Dead Person Voting.

Marci Andino, a top state election official, testified that every single one of those 6 people were eligible to vote.

Corey Hutchins of the Columbia based Free-Times reported:

In a news release election agency spokesman Chris Whitmire handed out prior to the hearing, the agency disputed the claim that dead people had voted. One allegedly dead voter on the DMV’s list cast an absentee ballot before dying; another was the result of a poll worker mistakenly marking the voter as his deceased father; two were clerical errors resulting from stray marks on voter registration lists detected by a scanner; two others resulted from poll managers incorrectly marking the name of the voter in question instead of the voter above or below on the list. The attorney general’s office had only given the State Election Commission six names off its list of 957 names to examine. The agency found every one of them to be alive and otherwise eligible to vote, except for the one who had voted before dying. During her testimony, Andino confronted the DMV’s claim that dead people had voted.

“Characterizing this as an established fact threatens our confidence” in the election process, she said. “This is not a question that needs to linger in the minds of voters … the truth is out there.”

Darn it! They were so close to proving a need for those pesky voter ID laws that the Department of Justice denied them after they couldn’t prove a need for them. South Carolina even got Fox News to help spread the myth. What’s a state to do when they can’t even rely on Fox News’ lies to enable them to disenfranchise Democrats?

You might think that the zombie petrified Republicans would turn over this list of 957 people who are dead but voted, but they have been keeping the list top secret even while claiming it to be established fact on Fox News. Andino has been asking for the list and reports that she may be allowed to view it today. Or may not.

Not that it matters. After all, the point has been made for Fox News viewers, who will a) never be told that they were misled and b) not care when the truth is pointed out to them.

Just remember this the next time Fox News cries wolf. There are no dead people voting in South Carolina. The only voting fraud proven to be going on in this country recently is from Republican elected officials and a bizarre conservative activist known for his proclivity for dressing up as a pimp/dead person. But heck, it’s not as if we can’t afford a few million to help Republicans try to win elections by denying the vote to certain people by lying about dead zombies taking over the polls.

Fox News: Where Zombies Rule!

Image: The Psych Files

h/t Media Matters