Author of right-wing voter fraud 'study' on probation for Jack Abramoff-connected fakery

Horace Cooper Ryan J. Reilly is reporting that Horace Cooper, the author of a paper saying voter ID protects minority voters, remains on probation for making fraudulent statements on disclosure forms.

Cooper may not have any expertise on voter fraud, but he does know a thing or two about falsifying documents. Cooper was indicted in 2009 on five public corruption charges, charged with exchanging political favors for gifts from Jack Abramoff. Cooper allegedly accepted bribes as a staffer to former Majority Leader Dick Armey, as chief of staff for Voice of America and when he worked for the Department of Labor. Cooper later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of falsifying a disclosure report and was sentenced to 36 months of probation.

Cooper failed earlier this year to persuade a judge to shorten his probation.

He wrote the voter ID paper, which Fox News and the right-wing Daily Caller have labeled a "study," for the 30-year-old National Center for Public Policy Research, which describes itself as a 'conservative, free-market, non-profit think-tank.' After the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) took voter identification laws off its priority list last April, NCPPR stepped up to the plate with its Voter Identification Task Force.

The paper reads like a screechy op-ed. Its footnotes refer only to newspaper or online media sources. In it, Cooper claims that Democrats and groups like the now-defunct ACORN have engaged in wide-scale voter fraud that includes large-scale registering of dead people, felons and non-citizen immigrants. In the latter two cases, they tell the newly registered voters how to cast their ballots, he claims. He outrageously compares what he claims they did by targeting minorities with what was done under Jim Crow laws in the South. Another fine example of upsidedownism.

The solution, he says, parroting the Republican line, is voter ID.

The view of voter-advocacy groups is that voter ID tends to make it more difficult for certain demographics to vote, specifically the youngest voters, the oldest ones and minorities. But Cooper claims the lack of IDs does not cause problems for such citizens at the polls and labels as flawed state data in Pennsylvania showing hundreds of thousands of people do not now have the IDs they will need at the polls in November

In a fine bit of incoherent word salad, he says: 'Merely because 18 percent do not have at present have the ID card it does not follow that lawfully, that is an impediment that meets the standard of a hurdle that would prevent a person from being able to vote.'

As many as a million Pennsylvanians may not have the right kind of ID to allow them to vote in November. Other states have problems too, but not as well documented.  Cooper and his right-wing sponsors don't see this as a problem. Of course not. Because theirs is a partisan mission tailored to suppressing the votes of people who, in the aggregate, vote Democratic. That the right wing is touting the tendentious voter fraud paper by a fraudster is so very telling.