“Believing in vote fraud may be dangerous to a democracy’s health,” Slate says.

Wouldn’t the merit of believing or disbelieving in something be more properly based in whether it’s, you know, true? Writes Slate:

Nobody is suggesting the Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts are perfect. But the suggestion that Barack Obama, through ACORN, is systematically working to get Huey, Dewey, and Louie to steal elections, and that therefore minorities and people of color should be disenfranchised, is cynical beyond belief.

But nobody is suggesting any such thing. Asking voters to show a valid ID of the sort that would enable them to buy a six-pack of beer or cash a check is not a plot to disenfranchise minorities, and the real cynicism is in using these kinds of flip, dishonest suggestions of racism to argue that it is.

A big part of the problem is the abuse of absentee ballots. John Fund writing in NR last time around:

In 2001, the voter rolls in many American cities included more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of residents over age eighteen. Philadelphia’s voter rolls, for instance, have jumped 24 percent since 1995 at the same time that the city’s population has declined by 13 percent. CBS’s 60 Minutes created a stir in 1999 when it found people in California using mail-in forms to register fictitious people, or pets, and then obtaining absentee ballots in their names. By this means, for example, the illegal alien who assassinated the Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was registered to vote in San Pedro, California — twice.

There are all sorts of reasons to suspect voting fraud. In most cases, the only way to prove fraud under the present system would be to challenge ballots after the fact, which means that you would have to know which ballots to challenge. But when you consider even basic, fundamental issues like who gets registered — Mickey Mouse, Jive Turkey, &c. — and things like the locations of polling places (in Philadelphia, for instance, polling places have been located in bars, abandoned buildings, private homes festooned with Democratic paraphernalia, and the office of Democratic party boss Sen. Vince Fumo) there is every reason to believe that basic reforms are necessary.