Judicial Watch Just Making Up Iowa 'Voter Fraud' Numbers, As If Iowa Needed Their Sh*t

And the (Republican!) secretary of state is pisssssed.

Judicial Watch is the conservative yet supposedly "non-partisan" activist group that exposes all several dozen of Hillary Clinton's murders. This weekend, the group made some shocking claims of voter fraud in Iowa. Judicial Watch issued a press release on its site declaring that eight Iowa counties had "total registration rates larger than [the] eligible voter population." There were allegedly 18,658 extra names on that state's voting rolls. That is alarming, but on the upside, it's also a big fat lie.

According to Iowa's (Republican!) Secretary of State Paul Pate, the official data from his office, as well as the US Census Bureau, showed that Judicial Watch's claim was false. From Pate's own press release on the subject:

"It's unfortunate this organization continues to put out inaccurate data regarding voter registration, and it's especially disconcerting they chose the day of the Iowa Caucus to do this," Secretary Pate said. "My office has told this organization, and others who have made similar claims, that their data regarding Iowa is deeply flawed and their false claims erode voter confidence in elections. They should stop this misinformation campaign immediately and quit trying to disenfranchise Iowa voters."

Iowa's voter registration statistics are publicly available on the Secretary of State's website. They are updated monthly. These numbers show that the ones claimed by Judicial Watch in their news release today are patently false.

Along with their false claims about the voter registration numbers, the organization's claims about Iowa population are greatly underestimated, according to actual data from the U.S. Census Bureau. 

  This still didn't prevent Judicial Watch's president, Tom Fitton, from promoting his debunked conspiracy theories on Twitter. Iowa has enough real problems with elections. It doesn't need this crap.

.@AaronBlake, we won't stop our watchdog work at the orders of gov't official. BTW, your paper reports today that 5… https: //t.co/EP9U3pDy0D

— Tom Fitton (@Tom Fitton) 1580792728.0 

Conservatives who fall sleep with visions of voter fraud dancing in their heads lapped up Judicial Watch's report. Charlie Kirk from Turning Point USA and Sean Hannity from Donald Trump's colon eagerly fanned the flames. Official declarations of "facts" from Iowa's Republican secretary of state are apparently all part of the Deep State coverup. Eroding faith in Iowa's elections feels especially petty at a time when Iowa was doing a pretty good job of that on its own.

Alex Howard, director of the Digital Democracy Project, called out Judicial Watch as a persistent source of disinformation regarding election integrity. Kirk seized on the group's most recent bogus claims to argue for nationwide voter ID laws.

The Iowa Secretary of State won’t name & shame @JudicialWatch for being the source of disinformation, but I hope na… https: //t.co/Lj4jKVs1tV

— Alex Howard (@Alex Howard) 1580776923.0 

Howard argued that tech companies and news outlets should deny Judicial Watch a platform to spread lies. Judicial Watch's garbage somehow avoids violating Twitter's own terms of service because it doesn't actively "suppress voter turnout." That makes no sense, as diminishing faith in our elections is a prime method of keeping people from voting. People have jobs and lives. If you make them think their vote doesn't matter or at least won't matter as much as all the ones from dead people on the voter rolls, they'll stay home. The peaceful transfer of power and orderly elections in general require that politicians and their supporters trust the results. The big challenge isn't just defeating Trump in November. It's getting him to actually leave. It's naive to think the president won't dispute results he doesn't like. And if the election is close, we can only dare imagine how Trump, with the aid of Fox News, would leverage the uncertainty.

[ Twitter ]

 Follow Stephen Robinson on  Twitter.  

Yr Wonkette is supported entirely by reader donations, and this month we doubled our number of mouths to feed! Please click the clickie, if you are able!