Forgetting Yesterday

by digby

As we go down the rabbit hole of voter fraud once again, it seems as if it would be a good idea to revisit the recent history of GOP program of vote suppression. It’s almost incomprehensible to me that after the US Attorney scandals, which were tagged directly to illegal attempts to prosecute bogus voter fraud,that the press is swallowing this ACORN stuff whole.

Just as a reminder, here’s an article from Salon from a year or so ago about Rove and his legacy of election stealing:

By evil chance, I spent the Saturday night before Election Day 2000 at a jolly dinner for high-level Republicans. Most of the talk over the entrees concerned why then-candidate George W. Bush had been too pusillanimous to tell the voters that Al Gore was not just a liberal, but a Soviet-style Marxist-Leninist. But as the desserts circulated, so too did a piece of comic relief — an anonymous leaflet explaining to voters that because of heavy voter registration, the rules had been changed: Republicans would vote on Tuesday, Democrats and independents on Wednesday. I think of that dinner whenever I read about the widening scandal of the U.S. attorneys and the politicization of the Justice Department under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Gonzo is probably the most endangered man since William Tell’s son Walter. The pattern behind the scandal, however, transcends Gonzales’ fate or that of his underlings. At least part of the U.S. attorneys plot seems to derive from the “election fraud” hoax that Republicans are trying to perpetrate in order to gain control of the country’s voter lists. So nailing this inept crew of thugs won’t be good enough. We need laws protecting the right to vote from the kind of phony, partisan prosecutors that Gonzales, Rove and Co. were trying to put in place, and from the punitive, restrictive voter-ID laws that are a prominent part of the far-right political agenda. Republicans do cherish their little practical jokes — the leaflets in African-American neighborhoods warning that voters must pay outstanding traffic tickets before voting; the calls in Virginia in 2006 from the mythical “Virginia Election Commission” warning voters they would be arrested if they showed up at the polls. The best way to steal an election is the old-fashioned way: control who shows up. It’s widely known that Republicans do better when the turnout is lighter, whiter, older and richer; minorities, young people and the poor are easy game for hoaxes and intimidation. The latest and most elaborate of these jokes is the urban legend that American elections are rife with voter fraud, particularly in the kinds of poor and minority neighborhoods inhabited by Democrats. In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that fraudulent voting would be a major target of the Department of Justice. As the New York Times reported last month, the main result of this massive effort was such coups as the deportation of a legal immigrant who mistakenly filled out a voter-registration card while waiting in line at the department of motor vehicles. But the administration has remained ferociously committed to suppressing voter fraud — as soon as it can find some. In April of last year, Karl Rove warned a Republican lawyers’ group that “we have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today. We are, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it’s a real problem. “I appreciate that all that you’re doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot — the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it’s important to our democracy.” One of the aims of the abortive purge of U.S. attorneys was to punish those who refused to toe the line on the new emphasis on alleged voter fraud. A few fired prosecutors would serve as examples to the rest –- either move to criminalize the election process or face dismissal. But the assault on voter fraud was a solution looking for a problem. As part of the Help America Vote Act, Republicans insisted on creating the Election Assistance Commission, which commissioned studies of the asserted problem. When the studies failed to turn up evidence of fraud nationwide, appointed Republican officials on the EAC insisted that the language say only that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud in elections” — the same approach to inconvenient evidence that’s made the Bush global-warming policy the envy of the world.

Today, they’ve trotted out Village Wise Man John Danforth, who almost certainly gave the entire village a collective thrill up their legs. He is a high priest of bipartisan seriousness and if he says there’s a problem with voter fraud I have little doubt that the establishment will immediately start fulminating about it despite the fact that Karl Rove and the GOP have been up to their necks in vote suppression for years. Danforth and Rudman (also on deck to help) wouldn’t lie. They are “above politics” don’t you know.

Their full blown propaganda campaign of the moment is aimed at furthering several different related goals. The first is to freak out the local registration offices, many of which are run by small town bureaucrats who are either subject to the propaganda or are GOP partisans themselves. They want to create a feeling of chaos around the voting processes and call the absentee ballots into question.

The second is to intimidate voters into not participating and making it difficult for those who do. They want people to believe that they will be grilled and scrutinized when they try to vote and perhaps make lines long and the process so arduous that people will give up.

Third, if the election is close, they will challenge its validity in court. After all, that worked like a charm in 2000. But barring that — and it looks like it won’t be close enough to do that — they are laying the ground work to delegitimize the victory. That is an essential tool for rebuilding their movement and crating justification for the kind of character assassination and obstructionism that is their specialty.

If Ann Kornblut on MSNBC a few minutes ago is any indication the press sees this as a “both sides do it” sort of thing. Democrats complained about Bush vs Gore and vote caging and phone jamming and the vote suppression program in Ohio over the past two very close elections. Therefore, it’s equivalent that the Republicans would complain about voter fraud and ACORN. The difference, of course, is that vote suppression was so inculcated in to the republican governing apparatus that they fired the US Attorneys for failing do their bidding and bring false voter fraud cases. That should be just a little bit of a heads up about who’s doing what here.

The media needs to talk to Iglesias and McKay and some of the others involved in that scandal to remind themselves about the kind of systematic pressure that was brought to bear to effect the outcomes of elections during the Bush years. It might just wise them up to how absurd this hissy fit about ACORN really is. (But I doubt it … )

Update: here’s a good overview on the voter fraud fraud.

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