Voter Registration Fraud Ignored By Fox News This Time Around

Voter registration fraud was a big deal to Fox News and Republicans in 2008, when it was left-leaning group ACORN submitting fraudulent voter registration forms.

The fraud led to allegations that the group was trying to steal the election for Barack Obama, a sentiment that became so widespread that a 2009 poll found that a majority of Republicans believed ACORN stole the election for Obama.

But this time, now that a story unfolding out of Florida that an organization with close ties to the Republican Party is doing the same thing as ACORN, the same pundits and news programs are strangely silent. As noted by Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media watchdog, Fox News seems to show little interest in covering the same voter registration fraud that it made a feature story in 2008.

The Palm Beach Post has reported that the Republican Party of Florida has cut ties to a company it paid more than $1.3 million to register new voters. This follows the revelation that Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher identified 106 questionable registration applications.

NBCNews.com reported that the voter registration fraud may extend further. Four other counties in Florida have reported hundreds of possibly fraudulent registration forms.

And the voter registration fraud may extend even further than Florida. Republicans in Colorado cut tides with Strategic Allied Consulting, a firm run by a Republican consultant, Nathan Sproul. Media Matters for America reported that Sproul’s company faces the same allegations leveled against ACORN in 2008, that workers knowingly submitted voter registration forms with dubious information.

Media Matters for America notes:

In `08, that was enough to light a short fuse on Fox News and within the right-wing media, as players rushed in to condemn the independent ACORN group as a corrupt and a criminal extension of the Obama campaign.

And as the Christian Science Monitor reports, the allegations could have disastrous implications for the GOP. The report states that even if right-leaning media does not cover the alleged voter registration fraud as it did ACORN, the charges will not sit well the US electorate “which has watched battles erupt in mostly swing states from Florida to Ohio over control of voter rolls, and heated debates about potential disenfranchisement of key Democratic constituencies, poorer, minority, and elderly voters.”