By Brad Friedman on 12/30/2011, 1:17pm PT  

The BRAD BLOG was the first to report that the former disgraced Speaker of the House turned Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich had admitted to committing massive "voter fraud" --- thousands of cases --- in his failed attempt to qualify for the Republican Presidential Primary ballot in his home state of Virginia.

Our report on Wednesday came just minutes after Gingrich's caught-on-video admission to a voter in Iowa that his campaign had "hired somebody who turned in false signatures."

"Oh, it was just a mistake," the one-time front-runner for the GOP nomination claimed. "We turned in 11,100 — we needed 10,000 — 1,500 of them were by one guy who frankly committed fraud."

To our knowledge, however, Gingrich has yet to divulge the identify of the "one guy" who "frankly committed fraud" to law enforcement officials.

We noted that by the same (completely disingenuous) standards that the GOP and its cable TV arm, Fox "News", has long applied, for years, to the now-defunct community organization ACORN (which never committed any actual "voter fraud" or even "voter registration fraud", though a few of its workers committed the later, as discovered by ACORN themselves who promptly turned them into authorities), Gingrich was, himself, the purveyor of "massive voter fraud".

Last night, while guest hosting the Mike Malloy Show (listen to top of Hour 1), we even encouraged folks to contact the special email address that Fox "News" long ago set up for reporting such instances of "voter fraud" at VoterFraud@FoxNews.com to let them know about this massive destruction of "the fabric of democracy" as then GOP Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain hypocritically described it in 2008.

And now it looks like Chris Hayes, filling in on MSNBC for Rachel Maddow last night, picked up --- "from the Department of Shameless Schadenfreude" --- on the same theme, pointing out that Gingrich himself had previously slammed ACORN in a 2009 op-ed, in which he falsely declared that "ACORN has a long history of engaging in voter fraud," due to the exact same thing Gingrich now refers to as little more than "just a mistake". (Ironically enough, in that piece, Gingrich used the fraudulent ACORN "Pimp" Hoax video tapes created by James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles and Andrew Breitbart as the basis for his entire op-ed lie.)

Here's the short video from MSNBC last night, and a few more words to follow detailing how what Gingrich Campaign did was far worse than anything ACORN was ever found to have done...


In covering Hayes' coverage today, Mediate's Tommy Christopher notes, as we did on both Wednesday and Thursday, that what Gingrich did is far worse, by several standards, than anything that ACORN --- who was defrauded by several of their workers --- ever did...

While Hayes is to be congratulated for calling Gingrich out, it's important to note that Gingrich's behavior was arguably worse than what ACORN was accused of. First of all, the “voter fraud” that ACORN was accused of didn't actually result in Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck being “added to the voter rolls.”

In fact, ACORN was required, by law, to submit each and every voter registration that they gathered, no matter what, but unlike Gingrich, ACORN reviewed and flagged tens of thousands of dodgy applications to make it easier for registrars to weed out the likes of Mickey and Donald. Although it's a popular talking point, this type of “fraud” doesn't result in any fraudulent votes being cast.

Another distinguishing feature between ACORN and Gingrich is that, flagged applications notwithstanding, ACORN had a much better ratio of valid registrations to fraudulent ones than Gingrich. 13% of Gingrich's signatures were bogus, while ACORN's error rate was around 1.5%, according to Project Vote. Most of the ACORN applications that were rejected were duplicates, not fraudulent ones.

The biggest difference, though, is that ACORN was registering voters in heavily minority communities, registering the kinds of people that Newt Gingrich wants to fire and replace with poor little inner-city nine year-olds. Registering those people is a heinous crime. Fraudulently getting Newt Gingrich on the Virginia primary ballot, apparently, is just a “mistake.”

While Christopher is to be congratulated for accurately reporting the truth about the GOP's phony claims about ACORN having committed "voter fraud", both he and Hayes (who both, along with some of Maddow's producers, follow us on Twitter) forgot to offer The BRAD BLOG a friendly hat-tip for first drawing a bead on this latest case of extraordinary hypocrisy in the storied annals of the GOP's years-long, fraudulent "voter fraud" scam.

It's quite possible, however --- even as we had tweeted the hell out of it over the last two days --- that neither of the two gentlemen had noticed our premiere coverage here. So, as it's the end of the year and we're feeling quite generous today, we'll just chalk the entire matter up to "a mistake" rather than out-and-out "fraud". ;-)

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And, by the way... Since we tend to get a lot of zombie Rightwingers who have been played for fools by Fox for so many years that they actually believe their nonsense, coming to comment here on items such as this --- despite the fact they rarely read this far into any article --- we'll just note again here for good measure that there exists zero evidence that any fraudulent vote has ever been cast by anyone in any election anywhere at anytime via any improper registration by any ACORN worker. But please feel free to demonstrate to us otherwise! (Good luck with that!)

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Article Categories: BRAD BLOG, MSNBC, Virginia, Election Fraud, Accountability, John McCain, ACORN, Election 2012, Rachel Maddow, Newt Gingrich, Chris Hayes