On March 30th, I cited an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled "The Myth Of Voter Fraud" in which the authors wrote, "The notion of widespread voter fraud, as these prosecutors found out, is itself a fraud. Firing a prosecutor for failing to find wide voter fraud is like firing a park ranger for failing to find Sasquatch."

The New York Times has proven them correct. The paper shows that after a five year period nary any voter fraud had been found. Kevin Drum sums it up:

In 2002, DOJ changed their guidelines to make it easier to prosecute voter fraud. They made it a priority to find voter fraud cases. They appointed a clean slate of U.S. Attorneys loyal to the Republican Party. They set up training classes to help prosecutors charge and win voter fraud cases. But after all that, they managed to demonstrate fraud in a grand total of only 86 cases over four years. And even then, many of the cases of confirmed fraud were simply mistakes, while virtually none of them were actually designed to affect the outcome of an election.

So in four years of concerted effort, the Bush Justice Department managed to come up with maybe half a dozen cases of actual voter fraud. In other words, two or three per election cycle. Mostly in rural districts for low-level offices. And because of this, we're supposed to believe that it's a high priority to spend millions of dollars on voter ID laws that plainly do nothing except make it harder for poor people to vote.

Meanwhile, Karl Rove would have us believe voter fraud was an exploding epidemic, recently stating:

We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today. We are, in some parts of the country, I'm afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it's a real problem.

The fear-mongering never stops. Lies told to influence behavior, and those on the right readily comply.

This is America? It's Rove who is one of those guys in "mirrored sunglasses."