Fox’s Your World show promoted the bogus argument that heavy voter turnout in the Wisconsin and Arizona primaries “proved” that voter ID laws and fewer polling places do not suppress the vote. For good measure, guest Jonah Goldberg used the falsehood to bash former attorney general Eric Holder for speaking out on the issue.
Instead of doing any actual investigation into the subject, host Neil Cavuto read Holder’s tweet: “Arizona, now Wisconsin. Ridiculously long lines. Too few polling places. New voter ID laws. Our democracy is being stolen. Let people vote.” Then Cavuto turned the discussion into a debate with Goldberg and Nomiki Konst.
Goldberg immediately dismissed Holder’s claim and gratuitously attacked him at the same time:
GOLDBERG: There was massive turnout in Wisconsin. More people voted in this primary, I think, than voted in the general election in 2012. It was record setting in every way. So, yeah, there are going to be long lines. That doesn’t mean that the vote was being suppressed. This is Holder, essentially, behaving not as the former attorney general, but as a reliable partisan hack, which is what he was when he was attorney general, too.
Konst only got a few words out before she was interrupted.
KONST: The devil’s in the details, Neil. It’s not just about record turnout.
CAVUTO: It is about record turnout!
Konst explained, "Just because there's record turnout doesn't mean there's not voter suppression." But Cavuto seemed uninterested in that point.
Konst also noted that her own grandmother, who has “voted in every Democratic primary since 1946” was disenfranchised in Arizona because the election was called while she was waiting in a “five-hour-long line out the door in Phoenix.”
Later, Konst told of a 90-year-old African American woman, born in Mississippi, now living in Wisconsin. “She was turned away because she didn’t have a voter ID. Why? Because she didn’t have a birth certificate. Why? Because they only had white hospitals when she was born in the ‘20’s,” Konst said.
But Cavuto tried to dismiss that by asking, "Would you find that an exception?" Mostly, Cavuto stuck to the same right-wing script as Goldberg. "By all indications, among the congressional districts seen last night, a lot of them were running out of ballots, a lot of them were crowded and staying late open, as they did in Arizona," he said pointedly.
Had Cavuto bothered to do any “fair and balanced” research so that he could report and let the viewers decide, he would have discovered that Goldberg’s right-wing argument was a logical fallacy because correlation does not imply causation.
Watch it below, from the April 6 Your World.