MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE—I am here today on an expedition to see a taxpayer-funded exercise in ratfcking American elections. Looking at the members of the Presidential Advisory Commission On Election Integrity—the cheaper the crook, etc.—we see Kris (Papers, Please) Kobach, Ken (Ohio For Bush ’04) Blackwell, as well as both Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams; von Spakovsky is a veteran of the W administration’s corrupt attempt to fire U.S. attorneys who declined to participate in this very snipe hunt 11 years ago, and Adams is one of those nuts who pushed the New Black Panthers hoax into the mainstream. This was the most remarkable collection of vote-suppressors since the last time that Ross Barnett dined alone.

We’ll have a longer report later but, on the day’s first panel of “experts,’ we heard from John Lott, a.k.a. the former Mary Rosh. Given that episode, and the subsequent evisceration of his research on guns by actual academics, Lott has the approximate intellectual credibility of a manhole cover. Nonetheless, his new enthusiasm is “voter fraud,” and here he was at the hearing. At one point, von Spakovsky made the argument that the drop-off in voter turnout since 1960 was partly due to the massive increase in our prison population. (In this, of course, von Spakovsky was accounting for far more history than he knew.) Anyway, Lott jumped in and said that this decrease was “more than offset” by the laws passed in the last two decades to enfranchise folks who’d done their time.

Right now there are 2.3 million Americans in some sort of prison. According to the ACLU, 5.8 million Americans are disenfranchised by the patchwork of state laws governing the voting rights of convicted criminals. Since 1995, 20 of the 50 states have passed laws to return the franchise to those people. This is, of course, laudable. However, between 2001 and 2007, three states changed their laws, and the franchise was restored to a little more than 160,000 citizens.

More than offset?

Mary Rosh used to be smarter than this.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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