On January 3, Media Matters for America (MMfA) linked, among others, a Big Government item by J. Christian Adams to support its mischaracterization of a Fox News segment on South Carolina’s contested voter ID law.
MMfA cherry-picked a small portion of Adams’s post, while ignoring the bulk of Adams’s argument solidly refuting MMfA’s own weak defense of Attorney General Eric Holder, thereby obscuring his criticism from their readers.
Emphasis via MMfA:
In a January 3 segment on Fox News’ Fox & Friends, correspondent Jim Angle promoted a number of falsehoods and misleading claims about voter ID laws and the Department of Justice’s action preventing one such law from being implemented in South Carolina.
Even Vote Fraudster J. Christian Adams Calls The Analogy “Silly And Constitutionally Incorrect”
Adams: Arguments “Flimsy” Since “The 15th Amendment Is In Play When It Comes To Voting.”In a BigGovernment.com piece attacking the DOJ’s letter, J. Christian Adams wrote:
What Adams did was provide several solid arguments as to why Holder’s DOJ appears to be contesting the South Carolina law based largely upon misperceptions and fuzzy math for political reasons. Media Matters neglects to point out that Holder’s DOJ used out-dated data, grossly inflating any potential problem in South Carolina. They also repeatedly highlighted a 20% number already exposed as a math gimmick aimed at making the issue appear to be far more significant than it may actually be.
Likewise, the DOJ also turned its nose up at the late breaking development that the data were wrong. The state of South Carolina discovered that the election commission had provided data that probably included tens of thousands of people on the voter rolls who moved out of state. That explains why they had no driver’s licenses but were still on the voter rolls. Instead of waiting to review the new data, DOJ rushed its objection out the door. A credible operation, not interested in scoring political points, would have waited to review the correct data.
More on that issue here:
Apparently South Carolina thought that the numbers seemed off, too. According to this eye-opening interview with South Carolina’s Attorney General Wilson, the state did an audit and found that that group of 239,000 included 37,000 people who were deceased, 96,000 who had moved to other states, and other discrepancies.
Wilson claims that the actual number of people without DMV-issued ID is actually about 27,000. (It should be mentioned here as an aside that South Carolina has made extensive provisions for those people who don’t have ID, including being able to obtain the ID free and even offering free rides to the offices issuing ID).
Even with exaggerated, out-dated data, the reported differences between minority (10%) and non-minority (8.6%) voters without photo ID are miniscule: a 1.4% difference. (Another way of putting it would have been to say that 90% of minority voters have the required ID, and 91.4% of non-minority voters do.) By manipulating these proportions, DOJ, with the help of the media and MMfA, spun that into a 20% difference.
DOJ: South Carolina’s Data Indicate Minority Registered Voters “Nearly 20% More Likely To Lack DMV-Issued ID Than White Registered Voters.”
In other words, according to the state’s data, which compare the available data in the state’s voter registration database with the available data in the state’s DMV database, minority registered voters were nearly 20% more likely to lack DMV-issued ID than white registered voters, and thus to be effectively disenfranchised by Act R54’s new requirements.
The Media Matters attack on Fox is based upon little more than data manipulation, selective quotation, and incomplete facts deployed in defense of the hapless Eric Holder and his politicized DOJ.
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