198 search results for ""election integrity""

Exceptional!

by digby

A study of election integrity around the world found:

Experts were critical about flawed elections in several long-established democracies, such as Italy and Japan. Most strikingly, according to the PEI index, the United States ranked 26th out of 73 elections under comparison worldwide, the lowest score among Western nations. Experts highlighted concern over American practices of district boundaries, voter registration and campaign finance.

What with all the cracking down on non-existent voter fraud and runaway campaign contributions from billionaires, we can get down in the 50s in no time.

And hey, our vaunted electoral college guarantees that from time to time we will elect someone who fails to get a majority, and when there is a dispute in the electoral college we turn to outright banana republic tactics and allow the political machines to install someone who didn’t actually get the most votes. I’m thinking that if they took those practices into account we’d be down there with Malaysia and Indonesia.

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Back to Ohio

by digby

By this point everyone should know about Ohio Secretary of State Jon “Katherine Harris” Husted. He’s gettin’ ‘er done. Here’s Ari Berman:

Once again Husted is playing the voter suppression card, this time at the eleventh hour, in a controversial new directive concerning provisional ballots. In an order to election officials on Friday night, Husted shifted the burden of correctly filling out a provisional ballot from the poll worker to the voter, specifically pertaining to the recording of a voter’s form of ID, which was previously the poll worker’s responsibility. Any provisional ballot with incorrect information will not be counted, Husted maintains. This seemingly innocuous change has the potential to impact the counting of thousands of votes in Ohio and could swing the election in this closely contested battleground…

In 2008, 40,000 of the 207,000 provisional ballots cast in Ohio were rejected. The majority of the state’s provisional ballots were cast in Ohio’s five largest counties, which are strongly Democratic. Moreover, provisional ballots are more likely to be cast by poorer and more transient residents of the state, who are also less likely to vote Republican.

The number of discarded provisional ballots could rise significantly due to Husted’s directive. It’s also very likely that more provisional ballots will be cast in 2012 than in 2008, thanks to a wave of new voting restrictions in Ohio and nationwide. The Associated Press reported that 31 percent of the 2.1 provisional ballots cast nationwide in 2008 were not counted, and called provisional ballots the “hanging chads of 2012.”

A series of missteps by the secretary of state and new rulings by the courts have increased the use of provisional ballots and could delay the outcome of the election and the legitimacy of the final vote.

Read on for the ugly details.

If this happens I’m fairly sure that everyone will just throw up their hands again and say “get over it” but at some point fixing our electoral system to prevent these shennanigans has to happen if the United States wants to continue to claim to be a democracy. When partisan election chiefs openly suppress the votes of their political rivals, you’ve crossed the line, even if the members of the jaded political establishment simply take a quick sniff of snuff, shake out their lace cuffs and declare the controversy dull and boring.

After the Ohio controversy of 2004 I wondered if Democrats were creating a legitimacy crisis by claiming that the voting machines had been hacked (among other things.) I was very short sighted and wrong. Even though I’ve been following this vote suppression campaign for a very long time, it never occurred to me that they would be able to institutionalize this “voter fraud” myth so quickly. They are very good at what they do.

Meanwhile, in Florida, early voting is in chaos. I think we all know about the possibility for a disputed election down there …

Update: Ah CNN, we can always count on you to claim that this is all silly partisan posturing, with the Tea Party backed “vote fraud” zealots True the Vote and Election Protection being two sides of the same coin:

JOE JOHNS, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Long lines in south Florida and in Cincinnati, Ohio, as early voting comes to a close, and those aren’t the only crowd this hotly contested election has attracted.

ERIC MARSHALL, ELECTION PROTECTION: Ten thousand grassroots and legal volunteers across the country in election country.

CHRISTIAN ADAMS, TRUE THE VOTE: Everywhere. They’re going to be everywhere. They’ve trained people in 50 states to legally poll watch.

JOHNS: Lawyer and poll watch of all political stripes descending on Ohio and across the country in search of any issues that need to be challenged.

MARSHALL: We’re looking for long lines that might be the result of machines breaking down, poll workers that might be asking the wrong question, asking for ID when they shouldn’t be.

JOHNS: Groups like the left leaning Election Protection have been training for weeks so they’re ready to respond to any problems at the polls in real time.

MARSHALL: With all the changes nationally in the voting laws, I think we’re prepared for there to be a significant amount of confusion on Election Day.

JOHNS: But controversy over how they do their job, poll watching has become part of the business.

(on camera): What do you think of the election protection people?

ADAMS [True the Vote]: Look, they have problems.

JOHNS (voice-over): Former Justice Department lawyer Christian Adams now represents True the Vote, a Tea Party-affiliated vote with a simple goal.

ADAMS: Free and fair elections. True the Vote stands with election integrity. Follow the law, period.

JOHNS: But True the Vote has real critics of their own from the left.

REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS (D), MARYLAND: True to Vote has been stay it is likely challenged the voting rights of legitimate voters we must address anybody who tries to deny anybody that right to vote and I consider it criminal. I consider it unpatriotic and I think — and highly offensive.

JOHNS: A claim Adams does not take likely.

ADAMS: They’re liars. They’re bearing false witness against law-abiding citizens who are doing no more than observing the process, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

No, he is the liar. True the Vote is doing a whole lot more than “observing”. They are actively interfering. But don’t worry, they aren’t just ordinary citizens. Republicans have installed some of these lunatics in official positions in Ohio.

And then there’s this:

JOHNS: Whatever the election watchers find, it may ultimately be up to super lawyers like Ted Olson to determine whether to go to court. Olson, a Romney adviser, led Republicans to victory from a Supreme Court battle between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000.

THEODORE OLSON, 2000 BUSH CAMPAIGN LAWYER: I’m clearing my calendar just in case I need to be ready for the next five weeks.

JOHNS: He says if elections officials want to avoid litigation, they shouldn’t change direction in the middle of the game.

OLSON: If you follow the rules that were in place on Election Day with respect to counting the ballots, then the presumptive outcome will be respected when the Electoral College votes are counted.

JOHNS (on camera): But the truth is there could be other changes to the rules especially as states affected by the superstorm get ready for the election.

Notice the similar language of Adams the Tea Partier and Olson the top lawyer: “Follow the law, period.” No matter how trivial, no matter how many it disenfranchises, every tiny bureaucratic rule is sacred when it comes to counting the votes of Democrats. There will be no exceptions, even to allow citizens to cast their legal vote.

The good news is that Democrats are more prepared this time and have their people ready to go too. If there’s going to be a post election fight it won’t be as one-sided this time.

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GOP vote suppression: the fringe and the establishment sittin’ in a tree

by digby

This little tid-bit should be of interest to mainstream reporters who are following the “Voter Fraud” stories but I suspect it’s going to fall under the radar:

Conservative activist James O’Keefe plotted a potential voter fraud sting of the Service Employees International Union in 2010 in Massachusetts — a sting that, had it been carried out, could have been funded by Rick Santorum patron Foster Friess.

The plot is elaborated on and eventually ruled out in an email chain started by conservative writer John Fund, who emailed Republican National Lawyers Association executive director Michael Thielen that the union was “contracting for buses on election day.”

“If you’re black or brown they’ll rope you in and take you to the polls, registration can be worked out,” Fund wrote, per his “Boston source.” His email was forwarded on to others, forming the basis for the plans.

The email exchange, parts of which may be missing, is below. Read from the bottom. The last email is from James O’Keefe to associates Stan Dai and Nadia Naffe, who later filed harassment charges against O’Keefe.

Others on the thread include Heather Higgins, the founder of the conservative Independent Women’s Voice and the late Andrew Breitbart.

Naffe told BuzzFeed she flew to Boston to investigate, but that they never uncovered anything of interest and the project fizzled.

This is a perfect illustration of the conservative establishmentand the lunatic fringe working hand in glove. O’Keefe and Breitbart proved beyond a doubt that they were both unstable and dishonest. Fund is a longtime Villager, undoubtedly considered quite a decent fellow by the likes of Dana Milbank since he’s “been around town” for years. The Republican National Lawyers association has been engaged in Vote Suppression since the 1980s, when they were engaged by the GOP to game the system in the wake of the Jesse Jackson campaign which registered many new voters. Foster Friess is just one of the dumb as dirt zillionaires they tap for whatever hare-brained scheme they come up with.

There are always the Floyd Browns and the David Bossies and the Andrew Breitbarts out there doing the dirty work. And they are always financed and directed by establishment characters like Wall Street Journal editors, wealthy ideologues and conservative institutions. Toss in Fox News and you’ve got a very efficient propaganda machine that works constantly to infect the public with lies. And it often works. A good many people in this country believe that African Americans and illegal aliens are stealing elections and that half the country is on welfare. That’s quite an achievement.

Recall that this conservative Vote Suppression effort has been underway a long time. Since the 1960s. And in the 80s they went national. But it was after 2000 that they realized they were going to need it if they planned compete. I wrote about Karl Rove speaking to the Republican National Lawyers Association back in 2007:

QUESTION: The question I have: The Democrats seem to want to make this year an election about integrity, and we know that their party rests on the base of election fraud. And we know that, in some states, some of our folks are pushing for election measures like voter ID.

But have you thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive?

ROVE: Yes, it’s an interesting idea. We’ve got a few more things to do before the political silly season gets going, really hot and heavy. But yes, this is a real problem. What is it — five wards in the city of Milwaukee have more voters than adults?

With all due respect to the City of Brotherly Love, Norcross Roanblank’s (ph) home turf, I do not believe that 100 percent of the living adults in this city of Philadelphia are registered, which is what election statistics would lead you to believe.

I mean, there are parts of Texas where we haven’t been able to pull that thing off.

(LAUGHTER)

And we’ve been after it for a great many years.

So I mean, this is a growing problem.

The spectacle in Washington state; the attempts, in the aftermath of the 2000 election to disqualify military voters in Florida, or to, in one instance, disqualify every absentee voter in Seminole county — I mean, these are pretty extraordinary measures that should give us all pause.

The efforts in St. Louis to keep the polls opened — open in selected precincts — I mean, I would love to have that happen as long, as I could pick the precincts.

This is a real problem. And it is not going away.

I mean, Bernalillo County, New Mexico will have a problem after the next election, just like it has had after the last two elections.

I mean, I remember election night, 2000, when they said, oops, we just made a little mistake; we failed to count 55,000 ballots in Bernalillo; we’ll be back to you tomorrow.

(LAUGHTER)

That is a problem. And I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a vegetarian or a beef-eater, this is an issue that ought to concern you because, at the heart of it, our democracy depends upon the integrity of the ballot place. And if you cannot…

(APPLAUSE)

I have to admit, too — look, I’m not a lawyer. So all I’ve got to rely on is common sense. But what is the matter? I go to the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I’ve got to show a little bit of ID.

Why should it not be reasonable and responsible to say that when people show up at the voting place, they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID?

We can make arrangements for those who don’t have driver’s licenses. We can have provisional ballots, so that if there is a question that arises, we have a way to check that ballot. But it is fundamentally fair and appropriate to say, if you’re going to show up and claim to be somebody, you better be able to prove it, when it comes to the most sacred thing we have been a democracy, which is our right of expression at the ballot.

And if not, let’s just not kid ourselves, that elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government, it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most. And that is not healthy.

QUESTION: I’ve been reading some articles about different states, notably in the west, going to mail-in ballots and maybe even toying with the idea of online ballots. Are you concerned about this, in the sense of a mass potential, obviously, for voter fraud that this might have in the West?

ROVE: Yes. And I’m really worried about online voting, because we do not know all the ways that one can jimmy the system. All we know is that there are many ways to jimmy the system.

I’m also concerned about the increasing problems with mail-in ballots. Having last night cast my mail-in ballot for the April 11 run-off in Texas, in which there was one race left in Kerr County to settle — but I am worried about it because the mail-in ballots, particularly in the Northwest, strike me as problematic.

I remember in 2000, that we had reports of people — you know, the practice in Oregon is everybody gets their ballot mailed to them and then you fill it out.

And one of the practices is that people will go to political rallies and turn in their ballots. And we received reports in the 2000 election — which, remember we lost Oregon by 5000 votes — we got reports of people showing up at Republican rallies and passing around the holder to get your ballot, and then people not being able to recognize who those people were and not certain that all those ballots got turned in.

On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County — I’m going to mispronounce the name — but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.

I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.

And I know we need to make arrangements for those people who don’t live in the community in which they are registered to vote or for people who are going to be away for Election Day or who are ill or for whom it’s a real difficulty to get to the polls. But we need to have procedures in place that allow us to monitor it.

And in the city of Portland, we could not monitor. If somebody showed up at one of those four voting locations, we couldn’t monitor whether they had already cast their mail-in ballot or not. And we lost the state by 5,000 votes.

I mean, come on. What kind of confidence can you have in that system? So yes, we’ve got to do more about it.

You’ll recall that most of the US Attorneys involved in the firing scandal were fired for refusing to use the power of their office to interfere in these very same states’ electoral systems. And when that blew up in their faces, they just switched gears and took it to the individual states. Like sharks, they never stop moving.

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Blue America Endorsement: Debra Bowen

by digby

Please join us for a chat with Debra Bowen today at 11pst/2est at Crooks and Liars

As you may or may not know, Blue America is based in Los Angeles and as progressives nothing has stuck in Howie, John and my craws more than the fact that that Jane Harman was able to hang on her seat in California’s 36th district (John’s home district!) despite the fact that she was a Big Money Blue Dog who barely set foot in the area. When she announced her resignation from the congress we whooped for joy. Her retirement to the world of think tank advocacy has given us another opportunity to elect a real progressive to fill the seat.

Amazingly, we are blessed with two fine progressives who have thrown their hats into the ring: Marcy Winograd, who we endorsed in the two primaries she ran against Harman and Debra Bowen the current Secretary of State who we also endorsed in her two statewide runs. It’s an unusual and luxurious choice for progressives — it so rarely happens that we have more than one great candidate.

We are fond of Winograd and greatly admired her willingness to take on the Democratic establishment as she did at last year’s convention. That kind of pluck is in short supply. She is a stalwart progressive and a good friend and it was a privilege to support her in 2006 and 2010. However, after much deliberation we have decided to endorse Debra Bowen in this race. The reason is quite simple. We believe that all other things being equal, Bowen simply has the better chance to win.

Bowen is a hero to California progressives and you may know of her through her national leadership on election integrity and internet issues as California Secretary of State. Indeed, she decided to run for the office after the debacle of 2000 for reasons I imagine many of us can relate to:

“I became motivated to get it right before we had another horrible disaster for our whole democracy,” said Bowen. “We couldn’t afford another election where there was vast mistrust of the results.”

She ended up winning the John F Kennedy Profile in Courage award for her work on election integrity.

With her high profile as a reformer and advocate for government transparency as Secretary of State, she has been a member in good standing of the Progressive Movement from the beginning, speaking at Netroots Nation and identifying herself with our cause. What you may not know is that previous to holding statewide office, she represented 90% of CA 36 for 14 years in the state Assembly and Senate and that she has a stellar progressive track record as a legislator as well. She is very popular in the district to this day among moderates and progressives alike, who see her as “their” statewide candidate. It’s a big advantage and one that we think will propel her to victory over all the others in the race.

As a movement progressive, Bowen will naturally lend her strong voice to advocate for working families in congress and stand up for civil rights and civil liberties. Her record is clear on that. And with her reformer credentials, along with her dedication to green energy (her first foray into politics was working with Heal the Bay back in the 1980s) she is perfectly positioned to be a leader for us, for our time.

As a progressive netroots candidate, Bowen is naturally running a people powered campaign and we urge you to contribute to her cause. She will have a race on her hands with Winograd, LA Machine City Councilwoman Janice Hahn (Harman’s hand-picked successor) and wealthy well connected Republican Mike Ross running and she’ll needs our help. We have a real chance to elect a movement progressive to this seat. Please donate if you can.

And please join us over at Crooks and Liars at 11pst/2est to chat with Debra Bowen.

Rover Fraud

by digby

McClatchy finally gets to Rove’s speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association that I’ve been writing about for some time:

The administration’s interest in replacing some U.S. attorneys, in voter fraud and in voting rights has sometimes had a political tinge, however.

Bush has acknowledged hearing complaints from Republicans about some U.S. attorneys’ “lack of vigorous prosecution of election fraud cases,” and administration e-mails have shown that Rove and other White House officials were involved in the dismissals and in the choice of an aide to Rove to replace one of them. Nonetheless, Bush has refused to permit congressional investigators to question Rove and others under oath.

Last April, while the Justice Department and the White House were planning the firings, Rove gave a speech in Washington to the Republican National Lawyers Association. He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in 2008. Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico. U.S. attorneys in the latter four were among those fired.

Rove thanked the audience for “all that you are doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the integrity of the ballot is protected.” He added, “A lot in American politics is up for grabs.”

Taken together, legal experts and other critics say, the replacement of the U.S. attorneys and the changes in Justice Department voting rights policies suggest that the Bush administration may have been using its law enforcement powers for partisan political purposes.

[…]

Rove talked about the Northwest in his speech last spring to the Republican lawyers, and voiced concern about the trend toward mail-in ballots and online voting. He also questioned the legitimacy of voter rolls in Philadelphia and Milwaukee.

One audience member asked Rove whether he’d “thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive.”

“Yes, it’s an interesting idea,” Rove responded.

(There’s much more to this very interesting story at the link.)

I speculated last fall that Rove quite cannily planned to use the electoral integrity meme that had grown up in liberal circles since the 2000 elections and turn it back on the Democrats. He’d certainly had experience with similar strategies.

Here’s a case from earlier in Rove’s career:

Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused on the Republican Fob James’s upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an unofficial tally showed that Rove’s client had lost—by 304 votes. Hornsby’s campaign declared victory.

Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. “Karl called the next morning,” says a former Rove staffer. “He said, ‘We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We’ve got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'” Rove explained how this was to be done. “Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper’s election,” the staffer continued, “and then to undermine the other side’s support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral—all of that.” (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.)

The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper. Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots.

As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, “We have endured lies in this campaign, but I’ll be damned if I will accept outright thievery.” The recount stretched on, and Hooper’s campaign continued to chip away at Hornsby’s lead. By November 21 one tally had it at nine votes.

The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby’s campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren’t notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. “The last marching order we had from Karl,” says a former employee, “was ‘Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we’re going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'”

Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge ruled that the absentee ballots should be counted, reasoning that voters’ intent was the issue, and that by merely signing them, those who had cast them had “substantially complied” with the law. Hooper’s lawyers appealed to a federal court. By Thanksgiving his campaign believed he was ahead—but also believed that the disputed absentee ballots, from heavily Democratic counties, would cost him the election. The campaign went so far as to sue every probate judge, circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination. Hooper continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the business community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said, “They steal elections they don’t like.” Public opinion began tilting toward him.

The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner—only to have Hornsby’s legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year.

When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove’s closest race. “On the afternoon of October the nineteenth,” Hooper recalled, “I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife’s garden, and she hollered out the back door, ‘Your secretary just called—the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you’re the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'” In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. “That Karl Rove was a very impressive fellow,” he said.

I don’t know why people can’t wrap their minds around the fact that one of Karl Rove’s specialties is stealing elections, but there are piles and piles of evidence that it is. (You’d think 2000 would have been enough to seal his reputation…)

I do not make this argument to suggest that Rove wasn’t trying to employ the Justice Department for voter suppression efforts. That’s been going on for decades. But I believe that Rove was also taking it to the next level, preparing to use the electoral mistrust caused by the stolen election in 2000 and the shennanigans in Ohio in 2004 to gin up a national GOP campaign to complain of Democratic voter fraud — and bring into question all close elections in which Democrats prevailed.

Rove understands that these issues are as much about politics and public perception as anything else. That example from Alabama tells you how he subtly influences the legal system through public pressure and ultimately brings it down to sheer political muscle. He either uses the public’s existing predjudices or creates new ones to make the people see elections as not a matter of accepted law and practices but rather a function of the political strength of the political machine — much like the old Big City machines, but on a national level.

Karl Rove meddling with any kind of voter integrity project, pro or con, should set off deafening alarms. Cheating and stealing and dirty tricks are what he does. The minute his name was brought into this scandal, a full and thorough investigation was required.

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Bad Bushie

by digby

This is rich. From TPM:

…the White House has said that U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico was removed in part due to his handling of voter fraud complaints. That’s backed up by the numerous instances of powerful New Mexico Republicans (including Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM)) complaining to Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and President Bush about Iglesias’ decision not to prosecute certain cases of voter fraud. What does this mean? It means that Iglesias must have been lauded by the Justice Department for his handling of voter fraud cases. And not just lauded — but cited as an example for U.S. attorneys across the country. From The Washington Post:

One of the U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush administration after Republican complaints that he neglected to prosecute voter fraud had been heralded for his expertise in that area by the Justice Department, which twice selected him to train other federal prosecutors to pursue election crimes. David C. Iglesias, who was dismissed as U.S. attorney for New Mexico in December, was one of two chief federal prosecutors invited to teach at a “voting integrity symposium” in October 2005. The symposium was sponsored by Justice’s public integrity and civil rights sections and was attended by more than 100 prosecutors from around the country, according to an account by Iglesias that a department spokesman confirmed. Iglesias, a Republican, said in an interview that he and the U.S. attorney from Milwaukee, Steven M. Biskupic, were chosen as trainers because they were the only ones identified as having created task forces to examine allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 elections. An agenda lists them as the panelists for a session on such task forces at the two-day seminar, which featured a luncheon speech by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. According to Iglesias, the agency invited him back as a trainer last summer, just months before a Justice official telephoned to fire him. He said he could not attend the second time because of his obligations as an officer in the Navy Reserve.

I think TPM is too professional here to cut to the chase and speculate wildly. But I’m not.

The “voter fraud” issue is actually not one that the administration used as a primary excuse for the firings and for very good reason. It is the one for which Rove is most likely to have been directly interested. It has to do with his personal portfolio, after all — stealing elections. We only knew that failing to prosecute trumped up “voter fraud” is likely one of the reasons some of these people were fired because the Washington state US Attorney brought it up as a possiblity— and we know that Rove had a fetish about the issue.

This article reveals that Iglesias was a high profile “voter fraud” US Attorney who even ran a special task force to investigate the 2004 election. We know that he failed to find evidence of criminal wrongdoing — and we know that Karl wasn’t happy. Here’s what he said about New Mexico last April at that Republican National Lawyers Association meeting:

I mean, Bernalillo County, New Mexico will have a problem after the next election, just like it has had after the last two elections.

I mean, I remember election night, 2000, when they said, oops, we just made a little mistake; we failed to count 55,000 ballots in Bernalillo; we’ll be back to you tomorrow.

We did not previously know that Iglesias was a specialist in the field, which makes the interference even more damning for the administration. It’s quite clear that Rove refused to take no for an answer, even when the person who was refusing to indict was someone of impeccable credentials. That and his alleged failure to indict a Democrat before the election put him in the category of “bad Bushie.” He had to go.

Remember what Rove also said before those lawyers last spring:

Well, I learned all I needed to know about election integrity from the college Republicans.

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Stealin’ It

by digby

Before the election last November I wrote a post about what I thought Karl Rove might have up his sleeve. I wrote:

We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate — and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections:

QUESTION: The question I have: The Democrats seem to want to make this year an election about integrity, and we know that their party rests on the base of election fraud. And we know that, in some states, some of our folks are pushing for election measures like voter ID.

But have you thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive?

ROVE: Yes, it’s an interesting idea. We’ve got a few more things to do before the political silly season gets going, really hot and heavy. But yes, this is a real problem. What is it — five wards in the city of Milwaukee have more voters than adults?

With all due respect to the City of Brotherly Love, Norcross Roanblank’s (ph) home turf, I do not believe that 100 percent of the living adults in this city of Philadelphia are registered, which is what election statistics would lead you to believe.

I mean, there are parts of Texas where we haven’t been able to pull that thing off.

(LAUGHTER)

And we’ve been after it for a great many years.

So I mean, this is a growing problem.

The spectacle in Washington state; the attempts, in the aftermath of the 2000 election to disqualify military voters in Florida, or to, in one instance, disqualify every absentee voter in Seminole county — I mean, these are pretty extraordinary measures that should give us all pause.

The efforts in St. Louis to keep the polls opened — open in selected precincts — I mean, I would love to have that happen as long, as I could pick the precincts.

This is a real problem. And it is not going away.

I mean, Bernalillo County, New Mexico will have a problem after the next election, just like it has had after the last two elections.

I mean, I remember election night, 2000, when they said, oops, we just made a little mistake; we failed to count 55,000 ballots in Bernalillo; we’ll be back to you tomorrow.

(LAUGHTER)

That is a problem. And I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a vegetarian or a beef-eater, this is an issue that ought to concern you because, at the heart of it, our democracy depends upon the integrity of the ballot place. And if you cannot…

(APPLAUSE)

I have to admit, too — look, I’m not a lawyer. So all I’ve got to rely on is common sense. But what is the matter? I go to the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I’ve got to show a little bit of ID.

Why should it not be reasonable and responsible to say that when people show up at the voting place, they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID?

We can make arrangements for those who don’t have driver’s licenses. We can have provisional ballots, so that if there is a question that arises, we have a way to check that ballot. But it is fundamentally fair and appropriate to say, if you’re going to show up and claim to be somebody, you better be able to prove it, when it comes to the most sacred thing we have been a democracy, which is our right of expression at the ballot.

And if not, let’s just not kid ourselves, that elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government, it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most. And that is not healthy.

QUESTION: I’ve been reading some articles about different states, notably in the west, going to mail-in ballots and maybe even toying with the idea of online ballots. Are you concerned about this, in the sense of a mass potential, obviously, for voter fraud that this might have in the West?

ROVE: Yes. And I’m really worried about online voting, because we do not know all the ways that one can jimmy the system. All we know is that there are many ways to jimmy the system.

I’m also concerned about the increasing problems with mail-in ballots. Having last night cast my mail-in ballot for the April 11 run-off in Texas, in which there was one race left in Kerr County to settle — but I am worried about it because the mail-in ballots, particularly in the Northwest, strike me as problematic.

I remember in 2000, that we had reports of people — you know, the practice in Oregon is everybody gets their ballot mailed to them and then you fill it out.

And one of the practices is that people will go to political rallies and turn in their ballots. And we received reports in the 2000 election — which, remember we lost Oregon by 5000 votes — we got reports of people showing up at Republican rallies and passing around the holder to get your ballot, and then people not being able to recognize who those people were and not certain that all those ballots got turned in.

On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County — I’m going to mispronounce the name — but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.

I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.

And I know we need to make arrangements for those people who don’t live in the community in which they are registered to vote or for people who are going to be away for Election Day or who are ill or for whom it’s a real difficulty to get to the polls. But we need to have procedures in place that allow us to monitor it.

And in the city of Portland, we could not monitor. If somebody showed up at one of those four voting locations, we couldn’t monitor whether they had already cast their mail-in ballot or not. And we lost the state by 5,000 votes.

I mean, come on. What kind of confidence can you have in that system? So yes, we’ve got to do more about it.

My speculation about Rove’s plans was greeted with some rather intense skepticism and in fact I was proven wrong. Rove didn’t do a thing about voter fraud.

But that’s not to say he wasn’t trying. With the NY Times reporting tonight that Bush was personally involved in the New Mexico matter by complaining to Gonzales about Iglesias’ refusal to pursue voter fraud charges, Josh Marshall writes:

There’s a sub-issue emerging in the canned US Attorneys scandal: the apparently central role of Republican claims of voter fraud and prosecutors unwillingness to bring indictments emerging from such alleged wrongdoing. Very longtime readers of this site will remember that this used to be something of a hobby horse of mine. And it’s not surprising that it is now emerging as a key part of this story. The very short version of this story is that Republicans habitually make claims about voter fraud. But the charges are almost invariably bogus. And in most if not every case the claims are little more than stalking horses for voter suppression efforts. That may sound like a blanket charge. But I’ve reported on and written about this issue at great length. And there’s simply no denying the truth of it. So this becomes a critical backdrop to understanding what happened in some of these cases. Why didn’t the prosecutors pursue indictments when GOP operatives started yakking about voter fraud? Almost certainly because there just wasn’t any evidence for it.

And when they refused to pursue bogus charges of voter fraud and Democratic corruption, they were bounced.

I don’t know if Rove will ever be caught red handed — he’s masterful at dirty tricks. (He taught the art of it when he was in his 20’s.) But when you see stuff like this anywhere near his vicinity you know he’s up to his armpits in it.

Stay tuned. This is shaping up to be a very serious scandal.

Check out the Wapo tonight, too.
The Attorney General definitely lied to congress, as did two of his closest aides.

Using Our Religion

by digby

Readers urged me to write about this today and it is worth some discussion:

The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez.

The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm’s operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said.

The inquiry on the eve of the midterm elections is being conducted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, the same panel of 12 government agencies that reviewed the abortive attempt by a company in Dubai to take over operations at six American ports earlier this year.

The committee’s formal inquiry into Smartmatic and its subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif., was first reported Saturday in The Miami Herald.

Officials of both Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government strongly denied yesterday that President Chávez’s administration, which has been bitterly at odds with Washington, has any role in Smartmatic.

“The government of Venezuela doesn’t have anything to do with the company aside from contracting it for our electoral process,” the Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, said last night.

(Right. This is worthy of investigation but the president of Diebold saying he was determined to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004 was just a figure of speech.)

The fact that the government is investigating Hugo “sulphur” Chavez’s alleged interest in election machines may very well be part of an emerging post-election GOP narrative. I have believed that Republicans might claim vote fraud in this election for some time. I wrote back in June:

The Republicans have figured out something that the Democrats refuse to understand. All political messages can be useful, no matter which side has created it. You use them all situationally. The Republicans have been adopting our slogans and memes for years. They get that the way people hear this stuff often is not in a particularly partisan sense. They just hear it, in a sort of disembodied way. Over time thye become comfortable with it and it can be exploited for all sorts of different reasons.

In this instance, there has been a steady underground rumbling about stolen elections since 2000. Now, we know that it’s the Republicans who have been doing the stealing —- and the complaining has been coming from our side. But all most people hear is “stolen election” and they are just as likely to paste that charge onto us as they are onto them. It’s like an ear worm. You don’t know the song its from, necessarily, but you can’t get it out of your head.

We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate — and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections:

QUESTION: The question I have: The Democrats seem to want to make this year an election about integrity, and we know that their party rests on the base of election fraud. And we know that, in some states, some of our folks are pushing for election measures like voter ID.

But have you thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive?

ROVE: Yes, it’s an interesting idea. We’ve got a few more things to do before the political silly season gets going, really hot and heavy. But yes, this is a real problem. What is it — five wards in the city of Milwaukee have more voters than adults?

With all due respect to the City of Brotherly Love, Norcross Roanblank’s (ph) home turf, I do not believe that 100 percent of the living adults in this city of Philadelphia are registered, which is what election statistics would lead you to believe.

I mean, there are parts of Texas where we haven’t been able to pull that thing off.

(LAUGHTER)

And we’ve been after it for a great many years.

So I mean, this is a growing problem.

The spectacle in Washington state; the attempts, in the aftermath of the 2000 election to disqualify military voters in Florida, or to, in one instance, disqualify every absentee voter in Seminole county — I mean, these are pretty extraordinary measures that should give us all pause.

The efforts in St. Louis to keep the polls opened — open in selected precincts — I mean, I would love to have that happen as long, as I could pick the precincts.

This is a real problem. And it is not going away.

I mean, Bernalillo County, New Mexico will have a problem after the next election, just like it has had after the last two elections.

I mean, I remember election night, 2000, when they said, oops, we just made a little mistake; we failed to count 55,000 ballots in Bernalillo; we’ll be back to you tomorrow.

(LAUGHTER)

That is a problem. And I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a vegetarian or a beef-eater, this is an issue that ought to concern you because, at the heart of it, our democracy depends upon the integrity of the ballot place. And if you cannot…

(APPLAUSE)

I have to admit, too — look, I’m not a lawyer. So all I’ve got to rely on is common sense. But what is the matter? I go to the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I’ve got to show a little bit of ID.

Why should it not be reasonable and responsible to say that when people show up at the voting place, they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID?

We can make arrangements for those who don’t have driver’s licenses. We can have provisional ballots, so that if there is a question that arises, we have a way to check that ballot. But it is fundamentally fair and appropriate to say, if you’re going to show up and claim to be somebody, you better be able to prove it, when it comes to the most sacred thing we have been a democracy, which is our right of expression at the ballot.

And if not, let’s just not kid ourselves, that elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government, it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most. And that is not healthy.

QUESTION: I’ve been reading some articles about different states, notably in the west, going to mail-in ballots and maybe even toying with the idea of online ballots. Are you concerned about this, in the sense of a mass potential, obviously, for voter fraud that this might have in the West?

ROVE: Yes. And I’m really worried about online voting, because we do not know all the ways that one can jimmy the system. All we know is that there are many ways to jimmy the system.

I’m also concerned about the increasing problems with mail-in ballots. Having last night cast my mail-in ballot for the April 11 run-off in Texas, in which there was one race left in Kerr County to settle — but I am worried about it because the mail-in ballots, particularly in the Northwest, strike me as problematic.

I remember in 2000, that we had reports of people — you know, the practice in Oregon is everybody gets their ballot mailed to them and then you fill it out.

And one of the practices is that people will go to political rallies and turn in their ballots. And we received reports in the 2000 election — which, remember we lost Oregon by 5000 votes — we got reports of people showing up at Republican rallies and passing around the holder to get your ballot, and then people not being able to recognize who those people were and not certain that all those ballots got turned in.

On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County — I’m going to mispronounce the name — but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.

I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.

And I know we need to make arrangements for those people who don’t live in the community in which they are registered to vote or for people who are going to be away for Election Day or who are ill or for whom it’s a real difficulty to get to the polls. But we need to have procedures in place that allow us to monitor it.

And in the city of Portland, we could not monitor. If somebody showed up at one of those four voting locations, we couldn’t monitor whether they had already cast their mail-in ballot or not. And we lost the state by 5,000 votes.

I mean, come on. What kind of confidence can you have in that system? So yes, we’ve got to do more about it.

Nobody can ever accuse these Republicans of not having balls. It’s really breathtaking sometimes. This is not an isolated remark. Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s Chris Matthews show:

MATTHEWS: … What did you make—we just showed the tape, David Shuster just showed that tape of a woman candidate in the United States openly advising people in this country illegally to vote illegally.

MEHLMAN: It sounds like she may have been an adviser to that Washington state candidate for governor or some other places around the country where this has happened in other cases with Democrats.

But the fact is, one thing we know, the American people believe that legal voters should vote and they believe that their right to vote ought to be protected from people that don‘t have the right to vote.

Rove was talking to the Republican lawyers association, many members of which specialize in “voter fraud,” and may very well be preparing to challenge every close race and file spurious complaints to Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department.

And even if they didn’t, be prepared to hear all of our complaints about election stealing yelled back at us if they lose. They are not afraid to take somebody elses talking point and use it to their advantage. It’s one of the things they do best and because a lot of people don’t pay close attention it will sound perfectly reasonable to them that the Democrats stole the election.

Just something to think about as we look to the morning after election day.

One other thing Rove said during that talk before the GOP lawyers:

Well, I learned all I needed to know about election integrity from the college Republicans.

I don’t doubt it for a moment.

*note: the excerpt of my original post has been altered a little bit to include more of Karl Rove’s comments.

.