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FAKE NEWS: Hillary Cites Debunked Study In Excuse For Losing Election

   DailyWire.com

As The Daily Wire has highlighted, Hillary Clinton’s third memoir, What Happened, does exactly what everyone expected it would do: blame a whole lot of people, entities, industries, and abstract concepts for her stunning electoral upset in November. Along with James Comey, Bernie Sanders, fake news, and the American people, Clinton blames Wisconsin’s common sense voter ID law for losing the key state. In doing so, Clinton promotes some fake news of her own by citing a debunked study claiming the law cost her around “200,000 votes.”

Here’s the passage from Clinton’s already deeply discounted book:

In Wisconsin, where I lost by just 22,748 votes, a study from Priorities USA estimated that the new voter ID law helped reduce turnout by 200,000 votes, primarily from low-income and minority areas.

See? The voter ID law, which was obviously implemented because of Republicans’ racist desire to suppress the minority vote, is the only reason Clinton lost the state which she never bothered to visit even once during the campaign.

But as NTK Network points out, the only problem is that even left-wing PolitiFact determined awhile ago that the “200,000 votes” claim by the study — which was produced by a pro-Democrat group — was nonsense. The left-leaning fact-checker looked into the study in May in response to Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s claim that voter turnout “was reduced by approx. 200,000 votes because of WI’s photo ID laws.”

PolitiFact begins by acknowledging the overwhelmingly pro-Democrat, pro-Clinton bias of the study:

The report was commissioned by Priorities USA Action, a political action committee that supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and describes itself as a “voter-centric progressive advocacy organization” that is “committed to standing up to the Trump administration and its allies.” The group says its “voter suppression analysis” is part of an effort to “glean lessons that can be applied to strengthen Democrats in elections in 2018, 2020 and beyond.”

The report was conducted by CIVIS USA, a Chicago firm founded by the chief analytics officer of the 2012 Obama campaign team.

The study found that while in states with no voter ID laws, turnout increased 1.3%, in Wisconsin, turnout decreased 3.3%. If the state would have followed the national average, then there would have supposedly been 200,000 more voters. Those 200,000, according to the pro-Democrat study, “would have been more Democratic.”

To say that the logic is a stretch is an understatement, which PolitiFact is forced to admit.

Also destroying the claim is the precipitous drop in voter turnout (around 3 million) from 2008 to 2012 in the state — well before the new law was passed. PolitiFact notes that experts have blasted the unacceptable methodology of the study:

“The story is getting picked up by Democrats and left-leaning smart people across social media because it confirms what they already think,” University of California, Irvine law and political science professor Rick Hasen wrote on his election law blog. “But there is reason for considerable caution about this study, which is at odds with what other studies of the effect of Wisconsin’s voter ID has found. There are questions about the study’s methodology being raised by people who know their stuff.”

Yale University political science professor Eitan Hersh tweeted: “No offense, but this is something that is going to be shared hundreds of times and does not meet acceptable evidence standards.”

In the end, PolitiFact found itself rating the claim as “mostly false.”

So what really happened in Wisconsin? That’s not too hard to figure out. Here’s how the Wisconsin State Journal reported Trump’s “stunning victory” in the state (emphasis added):

Based on polling, Democrat Hillary Clinton was positioned to win the state’s 10 electoral votes despite becoming the first major-party nominee since 1972 not to set foot in the state. She held a six-point lead in the final Marquette School Law Poll conducted just over a week ago.

So she utterly neglected the state for the entirety of the campaign … Yeah, must’ve been that voter ID law.

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