A story this morning out of Texas would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.

Backstory: Two years ago, Republican Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (who looks a lot like another famous Texas Republican, right?) made a pledge to stop the “epidemic” of voter fraud in Texas. He claimed that sneaky Texans were illegally voting, or double voting, and corrupting elections. Abbott spent $1.4 million setting up a special office to oversee the investigation. The results?

“Mr. Abbott has prosecuted 26 cases – all against Democrats, and almost all involving blacks or Hispanics…. Mr. Abbott has not unraveled any large-scale schemes with the potential to swing elections.”

And how serious were those 26 cases?

“In 18 of the 26 cases, the voters were eligible, votes were properly cast and no vote was changed – but the people who collected the ballots for mailing were prosecuted. State law makes it a crime to carry someone else’s filled-out ballot to the mailbox.” Among those pursued were Willie Ray, a member of the Texarkana City Council, and her granddaughter, Jamillah Johnson. They helped homebound senior citizens get absentee ballots in the 2004 general election and mailed them after they’d been filled out.

I’m sorry, did I read that correctly? Almost 3/4 of the “fraud” perpetrators were Democrats helping other citizens vote — like a granddaughter-grandmother team who dropped some ballots in the mail for homebound seniors? Seriously?

As any sober election observer knows, meaningful voter fraud in America is virtually non-existent. The fines are too steep, and the mechanics are too complex to pull it off. It would literally be impossible for a group of sinister voters to cast enough phony ballots to sway an election. The Texas AG’s two-year witch-hunt is proof positive. Abbott was desperately looking for evidence of an “epidemic” of fraud. He found Jamilla and her grandmother mailing in ballots for senior citizens.

(Of course, organized election fraud — shenanigans perpetrated by people counting votes or overseeing elections — that actually is a real threat. We all remember Katherine Harris tipping the Florida 2000 vote to Bush. But that’s a wholly different kind of fraud, and not what the Republican AG was trying to dig up.)

Truth be told, Abbott probably knew he wouldn’t find much fraud when he started. So why spend $1.4 million on a witch hunt? The same reason the GOP always wants to focus on voter fraud. They need an excuse to make voting harder. When you make voting harder, it disproportionately blocks young citizens, lower income citizen, citizens of color, newly naturalized citizens — people who generally vote Democratic. So if the GOP can fool us with the specter of voter fraud, they have an excuse to push for restrictive voting rules, like registration deadlines, ID requirements, and proof of citizenship amendments (like the one that just lost in Missouri — yay!).

Fortunately, stories like the Abbott debacle prove that the GOP’s fraud argument is bunk. Unfortunately, the argument doesn’t hinge on facts or reality. It’s just a scare tactic. Despite every single shred of evidence that it doesn’t swing elections, you will continue to hear “voter fraud! voter fraud! voter fraud!” for many years to come. Oh well. At least Jamilla and her grandmother learned their lesson: Don’t fuck with the GOP’s voter intimidation machine!