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Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo took to Twitter Sunday with some incredible breaking news as witnessed by the wife of a friend of hers: The friend’s wife saw nonprofit groups that were registering people to vote outside Texas driver’s license offices, which means that all those people just had to be “immigrants,” based on the fact that they were seen by Maria Bartiromo’s friend’s wife and she thought so. Bartiromo then repeated the story on her show Monday, returning to the theme again and again with guests who all agreed that this was an outrage and Someone Ought to Do Something!!!
Someone actually did: The Texas Department of Public Safety and the county GOP in one of the cities Bartiromo named both quickly investigated and found there was nothing to it. No noncitizens on the voter rolls, no massive drive of immigrants (of any status) getting registered to vote, none of it. Just as there never has been any such problem, ever.
Gosh, how embarrassing for Bartiromo and Fox, especially considering that she and the network should know better following that $787.5 million settlement of the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit. Haha, we kid: Fox and Bartiromo won’t face any consequences at all, because this time, Bartiromo didn’t specify any well-moneyed corporations that might sue the network’s pants off. No individual victims, no defamation! And to think people say she didn’t learn anything from the Dominion debacle.
Here’s the Twitter lie that started it all, but not a direct link because Bartiromo shouldn’t get any click revenue for it. Sunday, she claimed,
From a friend …
Friend of mine’s wife had to take her 16 yr old son to the DMV this week for a new license. Couldn’t get an online appointment(all full) so went in person and had to go to 3 DMV’s to get something done. First DMV was in Weatherford. Had a massive line of immigrants getting licenses and had a tent and table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote! Second one was in Fort Worth with same lines and same Dems out front. Third one was in North Fort Worth had no lines but had same voter registration drive.
In short, Bartiromo’s friend’s wife encountered the hitherto unknown phenomenon of long lines at the DMV and claimed the reason had to be a Democratic effort to register “immigrants” to vote. How did Bartiromo’s friend’s wife know they were immigrants? She could just tell, as many fellow bigots chimed in on Twitter, what are you, stupid?
Bartiromo then began telling and embellishing the story on Fox Business, changing the “immigrants” from her tweet into “illegals” because is there any meaningful difference anyway? She also claimed that those “illegals” were getting not only driver’s licenses but also Social Security cards before registering to vote, and that the tricksy Democrats were even expediting the new arrivals’ citizenship so they can vote in November!!!
You cannot get a Social Security card at any DMV, but Texas does want you to provide one to get your license. Same thing, isn’t it? And even after someone gets a green card, which undocumented folks by definition have not got, they must wait five years to apply for citizenship. Then again, in a completely made up story, anything is possible!
Bartiromo asked one of her guests Monday, GOP strategist Michael Balboni, what he thought of this terrible scandal that she made up with a little help from the wife of a friend:
“I’m serious about this issue of illegals voting, and I want to get your take on this. Apparently, the DMV offices right now are packed with illegals right now trying to get driver’s licenses, and they’re getting Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, apparently, in very short order after coming into the country. They want to get them naturalized as soon as possible before the election.”
That’s not how any of this works, as we already explained.
The whole story was debunked quite quickly, not that facts matter anymore. Texas DPS spokesperson William Lockridge told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that Bartiromo’s friend’s wife’s story was “simply false” and “kind of racist.” Just in case you’re paywalled out, Media Matters has the money quote:
Contrary to Bartiromo’s friend’s wife’s account, there is no office for the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles in Weatherford. Folks there get their licenses at a DPS Driver License office.
Still, no such tent and table were set up outside the office last week.
“None of it is true,” Lockridge said, adding that the assumption that non-white Texans lined up to get their driver licenses are immigrants or illegal is “kind of racist.”
“Just because these people aren’t white, that doesn’t mean they’re illegal,” he said.
There was a table set outside the DPS Driver License office in Lake Worth on Friday, Lockridge said, but not at the other two sites mentioned in Bartiromo’s post.
In addition, Parker County GOP chair Brady Gray posted a very long Tweet Monday saying that his group had investigated the claims and found no new influx of new registrations and that DPS had confirmed to him that there were no tents or tables on its premises, because that wouldn’t be allowed.
What’s more, Gray explained, Bartiromo’s friend’s wife’s scenario simply isn’t how Texas registers voters anyway. Voter registration applications first have to be processed by the county registrar’s office, and after that they go to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office to make sure the applicants actually are eligible to vote — that they are indeed citizens and live in Texas. He added that
Not only have there been no recent instances of ineligible individuals attempting to register in Parker county, there have only been two in the last 15 years.
As far as we can tell, “ineligible individuals” doesn’t necessarily mean only noncitizens, for Crom’s sake.
Nonetheless, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who never heard a fake “voter fraud” conspiracy theory he didn’t like, announced Wednesday on Twitter that his office will now investigate the very serious allegations of “organizations in Texas are illegally registering non-citizens to vote.”
Paxton claimed that undercover investigators were looking into voter registration operations near driver’s license offices, but he couldn’t point to any actual noncitizens on the voter rolls.
So hooray for Fox and Bartiromo: They’ve created a major rightwing cable news story after an unnamed friend’s wife thought she saw something nasty in the vote shed, and now the Texas AG is wasting tax money to investigate a thing that the state already has procedures in place to prevent. It might even whip up enough outrage by people who are primed to believe every lie they hear, because they are 100 percent certain that millions of undocumented immigrants are voting, no matter how much evidence to the contrary is put before them.
[Media Matters / Brennan Center]
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