New Orleans James O’Keefe, video fool, clown, and conspirator, is at it again. Yawn.
This time the scene was in New Hampshire where he and his associates engaged in voter fraud by attempting to vote in the Republican primary for President by using fake names. They released a video which got limited play on TV and virtually nothing in print. Ostensibly his purpose was to prove the need for voter identification. All he really seems to have done is once again unite the right and the left in agreeing on how sophomoric and misdirected his antics have become and the fact that his videos prove nothing whatsoever about the need for voter IDs. We could have told them that without the trouble.
TPM for example interviewed someone from the right wing Cato Institute, and their remarks are telling
John Samples of Cato told TPM that this would be a political issue and that O’Keefe was “pushing on an open door” because voter ID is politically popular. But he questioned whether it was worth the risk for O’Keefe.“This is illegal, right? This is fraud and you would think he would actually get into trouble for doing this,” Samples told TPM. Samples said that O’Keefe’s video could have an impact in the political fight over voter ID laws but “in the judicial fights — and the fight amongst wonks — it wouldn’t change much. The big question for policy always was what was the extent of it, and this doesn’t solve that question.”
Other sober election law experts and bloggers canvassed by TPM were even clearer that this stunt was little more than flat out, dead certain criminal fraud:
Hamline University law professor David Schultz told TPM that there’s “no doubt” that O’Keefe’s investigators violated the law.“In either case, if they were intentionally going in and trying to fraudulently obtain a ballot, they violated the law,” Schultz said. “So right off the bat, what they did violated the law.” Election law expert Rick Hasen, who writes the Election Law Blog, joked in an email to TPM that O’Keefe’s team should “next show how easy it is to rob a bank with a plastic gun.” “Who in their right mind would risk a felony conviction for this? And who would be able to do this in large enough numbers to (1) affect the outcome of the election and (2) remain undetected?” Hasen wrote.
Other reports indicate that the New Hampshire AG and various prosecutors in that state are investigating both the O’Keefe mess and whether or not there was ballot tampering. There was no indication that the federal judge in Louisiana supervising his 3-year probation for trying a virtual B&E (breaking and entering) of U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office in the federal building has revoked
probation, though from the above reports and many others, there seems “no doubt” that the law was broken here and then flaunted on video, which is what used to be called an open-and-shut case.
The www.americablog.com sums the latest O’Keefe escape up nicely:
O’Keefe is like a compulsive gambler who remembers hitting the jackpot on their first spin of the wheel and spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the high. It won’t surprise anyone to hear that O’Keefe didn’t report that one of his accomplices did get caught in the act. Election fraud is controlled by giving stiff sentences to people who get caught in the attempt. If people want to brake-test the election security system they should expect to go to jail when they get caught.
I’m tebowing that!