Please share this, it’s right up my alley, as you probably know by now. Cross-posted from AlterNet with permission. Read all the gory details at the link:

A new book by discredited partisans is meant to rile GOP voter vigilantes.

Right-wingers are in a tizzy over excerpts from a new book by two of the GOP’s leading voter-fraud hucksters alleging that Minnesota’s Democratic Senator Al Franken would not have won a statewide recount in 2009 were it not for ex-felons voting illegally. [...]

The problem with this assertion—from a new book by The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund and George W. Bush Justice Department attorney Hans von Spakovsky—is that it is not just factually wrong  [...]

Bonnifield sent a questionnaire to every Minnesota county prosecutor and found not one allegation of voter fraud was prosecutable beyond the issues facing the ex-felons—there was no double voting, underage voting, voter impersonation, coercion of  elderly or disabled voters, or non-citizen voting.  [...]

In a state where 2.9 million people voted in November 2008, even if there were 243 illegal voters—and that includes people who have not yet been proven guilty—less than one-thousandth of 1 percent of the state’s electorate registered or voted illegally.  [...]

But beyond arguments over voter ID, there is a bigger point. Republicans increasingly have been trying to tilt the rules surrounding all aspects of voting in recent elections—from restricting voter registration drives, to rules validating voter registration applications, to presenting more specific forms of ID to get a ballot, to toughening the rules for counting provisional ballots given to people who lack that ID, to suing afterwards if the vote count is close. All of these tactics are in play in the 2012 presidential election.

Beyond ignoring the facts, the implicit racism in this latest charge may be its most repugnant feature, as many felons are presumed not likely to be white.