Andrew Breitbart protégé James O’Keefe seems to be keeping Breitbart’s memory alive by continuing the tradition of generating supposedly inflammatory but fundamentally meaningless controversy. O’Keefe, the amateur filmmaker and conservative activist who rose to prominence by secretly filming ACORN workers, has struck again. This time he has produced a hidden camera video recording of him receiving Attorney General Eric Holder’s ballot during the DC primary, in an effort to illustrate the need for the requirement of IDs to vote.
For O’ Keefe this is seemingly a big victory. His work has earned him the masthead on Drudge for the majority of the day, perhaps the greatest honor a conservative can receive. It’s been a tough couple of months for O’ Keefe, his benefactor, Breitbart, died. Then a former accomplice, Nadia Naffe, has charged him with sexual assault. To top it off, an attempt in to get a dead man’s ballot during the New Hampshire primary fell flat because he used the wrong middle initial. He received a living person’s ballot, and apparently law enforcement is still investigating the incident. With all these hardships in recent weeks, it must have been nice to get back to his first love: creating dishonest and misleading videos.
The video goes like this: O’ Keefe walks into a polling station, identifies himself as Eric Holder, gives Holder’s address, and gets a ballot. On first blush this video seems remarkable. If a public figure like Eric Holder’s identity can be coopted to vote with such ease, it seems like surreptitious voting could be a real epidemic. But in reality, O’Keefe’s video was completely unrevelatory. Anyone who’s ever voted in a state that doesn’t require ID knows full well that actions like O’ Keefe’s are eminently possible. That's the whole point behind the Voter ID controversy: they don't require ID. I don’t need to see a hidden camera video of this reality, because I’ve lived it.
What makes the video even less interesting is the fact that the voter fraud O’Keefe seeks to expose is basically meaningless. One can try and surreptitiously vote if they are willing to put themselves at risk for 5 years in prison or a 10,000 dollar fine, but one vote hardly seems worth it. Heck, even 100 or 1000 votes just doesn’t seem worth the risk. Furthermore, there is no historical evidence of this kind of fraud. According to NYU, results from the carefully scrutinized 2004 presidential election in Ohio indicated that the voter fraud rate was 0.00004%, which is better than the odds of winning the Mega Millions, but still not great. In terms of voting fraud, new voting machines that don't leave a paper trail and have shown themselves to be vulnerable to manipulations are far scarier.
Just like the ACORN video, O’Keefe has illustrated that if you walk around and act like a jerk, people often won’t call you on it. These voter ID laws are serious business, and are just another example of the GOP trying to disenfranchise traditionally Democratic voters. In some ways they are reminiscent of the “poll tax” which prevented many from voting in the segregated south. O’Keefe’s work comes off like a comical sideshow, but it’s much more insidious that that. His work helps to confirm people’s worst fears, and perpetuate feelings of Republican victimhood that flies in the face of reality.
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