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Suppression From Wayback

by digby

I see that Slate and Rick Hazen have followed up on Bradblog’s research about the “the incredible, disappearing American Center for Voting Rights” — another one of those “vote fraud” front groups. Seems their web-site no longer exists and nobody can find them. This, after they were hastily put together just after the 2004 election to testify before congressional hearings on the scourge of voter fraud. Odd, don’t you think?

But they aren’t the first web-site to disappear. When I was doing research for my posts about former “voter fraud” specialist, Bush DOJ civil rights unit destroyer and now FEC commissioner, Hans Von Spakovsky, I couldn’t find the web-site for the original Voting Integrity Project, which was started by Helen Blackwell, wife of infamous GOP operative Morton Blackwell. The web-site was linked several times in this Salon article from 2000:

The Voting Integrity Project, which has focused on cleaning up national voter rolls, said the problems in Florida have shined the spotlight on widespread voter fraud across the county. “Election 2000 and the ensuing controversy in Florida have focused public attention on the need to combat voting fraud,” the group’s Web site reads. The Florida skirmish is just the latest battle in an old and partisan war: Republicans are usually on the side of cleansing the rolls energetically, and Democrats tend to fight back, claiming efforts to purge ineligible voters often cast eligible low-income and minority voters off the rolls. The battle goes back to Huey Long’s Louisiana and Richard M. Daley’s Chicago, cesspools of Democratic voter fraud where legend has it ballots were cast by dead people. VIP itself has come under fire for leading what some have called partisan crusades, opposing programs that make it easier to register voters, and supporting those that aggressively clean the voter rolls, which Democrats say disproportionately knocks low income and minority voters off voter lists. Though the group maintains it is bipartisan, it is true that it often allies with Republicans on voter-roll cleanup efforts. VIP gave an award to ChoicePoint for its Florida work, praising its “innovative excellence [in] cleansing” the state’s voter rolls. VIP is promoting the firm’s proprietary methods to purge voter rolls nationwide, and has partnered with Database Technologies, a subsidiary of ChoicePoint, to identify small communities that need pro-bono voter roll “scrubbing.” This year, VIP launched a pilot voter registration clean-up program, focused on Fayette County, Pa., and Atlantic Beach, N.C. In Fayette County, Democrats outnumber registered Republicans better than 3-1, according to data from the Pennsylvania department of state. In Atlantic, Democrats hold a 58-42 percent registration advantage over Republicans, according to the state department of elections.

There are various “Voting Integrity” groups all over the country now, on both sides of the partisan divide as well as non-partisan. But this was the original “VIP”, the one that spawned current FEC commissioner Von Skakovsky, and like the American center For Voting Rights, it no longer seems to exist.

Except it does, courtesy of the Wayback Machine. The most recent page I can bring up is December 2000, where it features such stories as:

Election Day Special:
Combat Vote Fraud!
If you observed any activity on Election Day that you feel is questionable, please report it directly to your local election officials and your political party officials. Then, also send us a report using our online reporting form. For more information on combatting fraud, click here to read Worried About Fraud on Election Day?.
News Headlines:
Election 2000 and the ensuing controversy in Florida have focused public attention on the need to combat voting fraud, the need for an accurate counting of votes, and the deficiencies in “motor voter” — all issues on which VIP has been seeking to raise awareness.

As did Americans For Voting Rights president Mark “Thor” Hearne, (who has cleansed his résumé of affiliation with the group) in 2005, Deborah Phillips, president of VIP, testified before the Senate on the spring of 2001 about the ongoing scourge:

American elections will probably always be vulnerable to vote buying, vote hauling, machine tampering and electioneering. But the National Voter Registration Act has tied the hands of election directors to protect the rights of legitimate voters from the dilution of vote fraud. This is a voter rights issue of the highest magnitude!

I have no idea what happened to VIP. Their web site is dead and they no longer seem to be active, at least in any obvious way connected to their former identity. Who knows why?

But one thing we do know is that “voter fraud” is a fraud, at least as any kind of systemic problem. Indeed, we have a much bigger problem and that is the suppression of legitimate votes by rightwingers who can’t win elections legitimately. And for some reason, all these organizations that dedicate themselves to this suppression, cloaking themselves with phony rhetoric about “protecting legitimate voters from having their votes diluted” seem to disappear after they “scrub” the rolls and testify before congress about the horrors of voter fraud they witnessed in the previous election. It’s all a coincidence, I’m sure. Still, it’s worth thinking about the next time the Republicans run their game.

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