How the South Carolina zombie-voter hoax collapsed

Republican liars in South Carolina are just like Republican liars in North Carolina. Still pushing Voter ID - a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. It's hard not to question their motives.

Last month, officials in South Carolina, facing resistance from the Department of Justice to their new voter ID law, concocted a ghoulish tale of dead voters taking over the state's elections.

As was suspected from the beginning, the fevered stories of "zombie voters" turned out to be fantasy. This week, state elections officials reviewed 207 of the supposed 950 cases of dead people voting, and couldn't confirm fraud in any of them. 106 stemmed from clerical errors at the polls, and another 56 involved bad data -- the usual culprits when claims of dead voters have surfaced in the past.

So the question is, how did this cheap B-movie fiction make it into the public debate in the first place?

Good stuff from Facing South and the Institute for Southern Studies.