RNC On New Mexico “Voter Fraud”: Never MindAs if you needed any more evidence that the Republican effort to tout voter fraud is less about legitimate claims and more about a political agenda, consider this sequence of events:
Last week, as we noted at the time, the New Mexico GOP had publicly claimed that 28 people voted fraudulently in the Democratic primary, held in June, for a local race.
Then this morning, the RNC sent out a press release announcing a 3pm conference call with reporters “on the recent developments in New Mexico regarding ACORN.”
But at 11am, ACORN — the community organizing group that Republicans have been trying lately to turn into a voter fraud boogeyman — held a conference call of its own, asserting that local election officials had confirmed that the 28 people in question, mostly low-income Latinos, were valid voters.
So here at TPMmuckraker, we wondered what the RNC’s response to this would be. And on the 3pm call, we asked party spokesman Danny Diaz.
Diaz dodged the question. He talked about an incident with ACORN in Washington state, then referred us to an October 9th Wall Street Journal story, which did not address the allegation made last week by the state GOP about fraudulent voting in the Democratic primary. (Instead, it reported that the FBI had opened a preliminary investigation into thousands of fraudulent registration forms submitted in an area near an ACORN office.)
When we tried to follow up, Diaz cut us off and shifted the discussion toward a general attack on ACORN for submitting fraudulent registrations.
In other words, it looks like the RNC had scheduled a call to tout evidence of voter fraud — not voter registration fraud, mind you, but actual voter fraud — being perpetrated by ACORN in New Mexico. But when ACORN appeared to come up with compelling evidence that no such fraud had occurred, the RNC held the call anyway, simply shifting the focus to other vague allegations against ACORN — then refused to address the New Mexico situation when asked.