Liberal comedian Jon Stewart makes it his mission every major election year to spread easily-disproven lies about the voting process and the Republican agenda, and this year was no different. On the Nov. 3 “Democalypse 2014” segment, the topic in question was voter ID laws or “voter suppression laws,” as Stewart called them.
Stewart’s go-to “expert” was MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry whose ridiculous talking points served as the “evidence” Stewart needed to suggest Republicans are racist and anti-women for making voters prove they are actually allowed to vote. Usually when Stewart plays and reacts to clips of people talking, it’s to mock them. This time, it was just to get Harris-Perry’s race-baiting theories on a show that people actually watch.
Stewart cited a misleading statistic that found only two cases of actual voter fraud in the course of the last ten years. “A lot of these laws smell pretty voter-suppression-y,” he said. He then turned to the clip of Harris-Perry on MSNBC.
MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: When you look at the kinds of ID that can be used in Texas, you can use your gun registration, but you cannot use your college voter ID.”
Stewart of course mocked using gun registration as a photo ID But he missed (or ignored) the obvious point – nobody can register a gun without a valid state-issued photo ID in the first place. And the gun registration is a state document. So it is more than valid form of ID for voting, as opposed to one meant to give access to the campus cafeteria.
[unidentified] TV clip: “The government accountability office, nonpartisan research, found in a study of voter ID laws that it actually lowered the turn out in Tennessee and Kansas, two states studied, among minority voters and younger voters.”
STEWART: “Ooh, the young and the brown! Hmm. If only they could find a way to get women on there they’d nullify the Democrats’ triple crown.”
HARRIS-PERRY: “Women change their names more often than men when they marry or divorce, making it more of a challenge to carry ID or proof of citizenship in their current legal name.”
That claim – that women may be incapable of keeping up with their current last names – is laughable. But comic Stewart just agreed, “There you have it!”
Though Stewart cites “nonexistent fraud” his facts are misleading. Stewart doesn’t mention the Democrats counting known dead people in their polling counts, nor the huge problem of illegal immigrants voting with easy access to photo IDs. Clearly the number of illegal immigrants voting is higher than Stewart’s cited “two known cases.”
