Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
I almost spit out my coffee this morning when I opened up the fishwrap newspaper this morning. The print edition headline on the front page of our sad small-town newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, reads "Setback for AZ's voting ID effort" — on Martin Luther King Day, no less.
A quick Google search reveals that no other newspaper publishing this Howard Fischer report used this politically biased headline. Most used "Citizen proof request rejected by federal eelction commission." The Sierra Vista Herald used "State bid to change federal election law rejected." Hell, even our sad small-town newspaper did not use this politically biased headline in its online version: Panel rejects AZ's bid to require proof of citizenship for voting. All factual headlines.
The headline should read "A victory for voting rights," or "GOP voter suppression rejected."
A "setback"? Several states have conducted extensive investigations into the FAUX News conspiracy theory of "widespread voter fraud in elections," and those investigations have all produced bupkis — zip, nanda, zilch. The number of cases of in-person voter impersonation are so rare as to be virtually non-existent.
I previously posted this Arizona Republic investigative report last year, Illegal immigrant vote-fraud cases rare in Arizona:
An examination of voter-fraud cases in Maricopa County shows those involving illegal immigrants are nearly non-existent, and have been since before the changes to voter-ID requirements were enacted in 2004.
* * *
None was convicted of a felony or given any jail time. A couple of the cases were dismissed; the other suspects pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and served a few months of probation.
Secretary of State Ken "Birther" Bennett testified to Congress in December 2012 that "Arizona has prosecuted 15 cases of voter fraud in the last 18 months or so. Those cases all stemmed from people who double-voted in prior presidential elections in both Arizona and another state." The Arizona Republic (December 19, 2012). In other words, "snowbirds" voting by mail-in ballots, not noncitizens impersonating voters at the polls.
Similarly, An exhaustive study of all 50 states by the investigative reporting project "News21" did an analysis, including a searchable database of all known election fraud cases in the country since 2000, turned up just 10 cases of voter impersonation. Out of 146 million registered voters in the United States during that time, those 10 cases represent one out of about every 15 million prospective voters.
Last week, a Commonwealth Court Judge in Pennsylvania struck down that state's voter ID requirement as unconstituional, following an evidentiary two week trial last year. "Voting laws are designed to assure a free and fair election; the Voter ID Law does not further this goal," Judge Bernard McGinley wrote in his 103-page ruling.
I don't know which Star copy editor is responsible for this politically biased and incredibly ignorant headline, but they and any other editor who approved this headline should face disciplinary action.
Good catch on the headline. It’s a mystery to me why a paper that’s had to cut staff and cut corners would expend the energy to write headlines that have already been written, unless someone takes a look at a reasonably accurate headline and decides it doesn’t have the right slant. I don’t know how it works with Howie Fischer articles, but I know AP articles go out with stock headlines that are used or slightly altered by papers, yet the Star will expend precious staff time rewriting the things.