Obama election lawyer Samuel Issacharoff (left). Source: NYU Law School

The left is desperate to quash James O’Keefe’s exposé of potential voter fraud in New Hampshire–and to prevent voter ID laws from being passed and enforced in states across the nation.

On Tuesday, during the New Hampshire primary election, members of O’Keefe’s Project Veritas recorded poll workers from both parties providing ballots in the names of recently deceased voters at multiple polling places across the state.

New Hampshire does not require voters to present photo identification at polling places. The state’s Republican legislature passed a voter ID law last year, but Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat, vetoed the measure, and the state senate failed to override his veto.

Left-wing groups and the Obama administration are targeting voter ID laws in advance of the 2012 election. Recently, for example, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder blocked South Carolina’s new voter ID law.

Ryan Reilly of Talking Points Memo (TPM) Muckracker has attacked the Project Veritas sting in an article alleging that “O’Keefe’s allies could face criminal charges on both the federal and state level for procuring ballots under false names.” Citing “election law experts,” Reilly concludes that the undercover video “doesn’t demonstrate a need for voter ID laws at all.”

The media has picked up Muckraker’s talking points (pun intended) and run with them. Salon.com, for example, smugly declares: “O’Keefe has pretty clearly violated the law and TPM reports that a federal prosecutor is reviewing his video. But at least he finally proved that voter fraud is a very real threat….As we all know, once you prove that something is hypothetically possible, it is a factual certainty that ACORN has done it.”

Even the Wall Street Journal fell into step, citing Reilly’s article: “Election law experts say James O’Keefe’s affiliates who got the ballots under false names could face criminal charges, as federal law bans not only the casting of such ballots, but their procurement as well, according to TPM.” Few of the media outlets repeating Reilly’s claims appear to have consulted “election law experts” with different opinions.

Curiously, one of the experts Reilly spoke to is Samuel Issacharoff of NYU Law School.

Issacharoff happened to be on Barack Obama’s legal team during the 2008 election, and assisted John Kerry’s campaign in 2004.

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