Voting expert Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation took on Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler after he awarded “Four Pinocchios” to Vice President Mike Pence. The veep told Martha McCallum on Fox News that voter fraud is “real,” which unfortunately has to be said when the liberal media suggests routinely it’s almost nonexistent.
Pence then mentioned a case in Indiana where “there was a group of people that were prosecuted for falsifying ballots. This happens, Martha.” But the Post went after the vice president under the headline "Pence’s hyped-up claims of ‘voter fraud’ in Indiana."
Von Spakovsky declared “it’s Kessler, not Pence, who deserves four Pinocchios for many of the misleading claims he makes about it in his column.”
Pence was wrong about the year -- it was 2016, not 2012. Kessler had to unfurl his Democrat rebuttal: "In 2012, the most noteworthy voter fraud case in Indiana involved a Republican — when former secretary of state Charlie White was convicted of six Class D felony charges, including voter fraud, perjury and theft."
Twelve individuals submitted fraudulent voter registrations as part of the Indiana Voter Registration Project (IVRP), which was operated by a liberal group called "Patriot Majority USA" aiming to register minority voters. These sketchy groups no longer exist.
Like a good liberal, Kessler thought investigating voter registration offenses sounded like minority voter suppression, just as liberal sites like Think Progress did at the time:
They were charged with relatively minor infractions related to filing false registration forms, apparently the result of pressure to meet quotas. The prosecutor said they were not engaged in voter fraud or trying to affect the outcome of the election. Ultimately, charges were dropped against an IVRP staff member and nine other people, while two people who admitted to perjury served no jail time.
Meanwhile, the state’s action also halted a successful effort to register minority voters in Indiana. That may have been the biggest outcome out of this case, not the hyped-up claims of voter fraud.
Von Spakovsky honed in on this passage from Kessler:
Moreover, nine of the defendants agreed to pretrial diversion deals, meaning they admitted wrongdoing, but the cases eventually were dismissed without prosecution, said Michael Leffler, communications director for the Marion County prosecutor’s office.
He wrote:
What Kessler gets wrong is this: There was a prosecution. He acknowledges that the defendants admitted their wrongdoing.
According to the IndyStar, they were given the privilege of participating in a pretrial diversion program in which they paid court costs, completed community service, and stayed out of legal trouble in “return for having the charges dismissed.”
There was no conviction of these nine defendants, but there certainly was a prosecution. The fact that the defendants were in a diversion program doesn’t erase the fact that they committed voter registration fraud and were prosecuted for it.
Kessler also tries to minimize this fraud by claiming it is not really voter fraud and that no fraudulent ballots were submitted as a result of these fraudulent registrations.
But that’s only because election officials caught these false registrations before they could become effective.
Now can you imagine anyone at The Washington Post trying to imply that when people admitted wrongdoing in the Robert Mueller investigation had their charges dropped -- say, Michael Flynn -- that they weren't prosecuted?
