771 search results for ""voter fraud""

Shaving The Odds

by digby

Via TPM, I see that a prominent Republican accidentally told the truth:

Baselice conducted a poll the first week in April for an anonymous client on another subject. He says he threw the voter ID question in on his own, because it was a hot topic at the time. He provided the results to Republicans, who are now using it to support their cause.

The poll found 95 percent of Republicans, 91 percent of independents and 87 percent of Democrats support using photo IDs.

Royal Masset, the former political director of the Republican Party of Texas, who trained Baselice, says it is easy to elicit that kind of response to a poll question.

Among Republicans it is an “article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections,” Masset said. He doesn’t agree with that, but does believe that requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a dropoff in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote.

After one of my rants about the 2000 “election” I remember an acquaintance telling me to get over it because Americans believe winning is everything and nobody cares how they do it. Judging from the raucous applause we heard at the Republican debate when the candidates tried to top each other with greater and greater declarations that they have no moral or ethical limits, I think that’s basically right. The cult of braindead Hollywood macho has become so warped that a good many people in this country believe playing by rules is for losers.

This is the dazzle-them-with-bullshit Enron philosophy taken to its logical end. The politicization of the justice department and trying to suppress the Democratic vote with onerous requirements was just smart politics. This Texas Republican quoted above committed the only possible error a modern Republican politician can commit. As we can see by the behavior of Bush, Cheney, Libby, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and every last administration war supporter, the only thing dumber than playing by the rules is admitting that you didn’t.

And anyway:

“The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States” (Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 104 [2000]).

So there you go.

.

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.

.

Of Course They Would

by digby

I wrote about this over the week-end but it’s worth mentioning again. This take on it is from James Fallows at The Atlantic:

Five and a half years ago, Thomas Wales was murdered in Seattle. He was shot, through the window of his home, as he sat working at his computer late at night.

[…]

The killing took place on October 11, 2001. If the ruins of the World Trade Center had not still been smoking at the time, and if the nation’s attention had not been completely (and naturally) riveted by that event, Tom Wales’s death would likely have become major national news. He was 49 years old, and he had spent the previous 18 years as a federal prosecutor in Seattle, mainly working on white-collar crime cases. He was gregarious, modest, humorous, charming, vigorous, very active in community efforts, widely liked and admired. A significant detail is that one of the civic causes for which Tom Wales worked was gun safety and at the time of his death was head of Washington Cease-Fire.

[…]

No one has been charged or arrested in his killing. But among the strange aspects of the case is that law enforcement officials fairly quickly began acting as if they knew exactly who they were looking for. For instance, a story last year in the Seattle Times said this about the case:

Agents have focused on a Bellevue airline pilot as their prime suspect. The pilot had been targeted by Wales in a fraud case that concluded in 2001.

Other reports over the years have emphasized that this same “prime suspect” was a gun enthusiast and zealous opponent of anyone he considered anti-gun. If – as is generally assumed – Wales was murdered for reasons related to his gun safety efforts and his past prosecutions, he would be the first federal prosecutor killed in the line of duty.

As best I have been able to tell from a distance, through the years law-enforcement and political officials from Seattle and Washington state have frequently complained that federal officials in Washington DC were not putting enough resources or effort into the case. The same Seattle Times story mentioned above goes into one of the disagreements. Everyone on the Seattle side of the story remembers that the Department of Justice in Washington DC sent no official representative to his funeral.

Until now, the heartbreak of the Tom Wales case, and the Washington-vs-Washington disagreement over how intensively the search for his killer was being pursued, had seemed entirely separate from Seattle’s involvement in the eight-fired-attorneys matter. John McKay, the U.S. attorney in Seattle who was among the eight dismissed, appeared to have earned the Bush Administration’s hostility in the old-fashioned way: by not filing charges of voter fraud after an extremely close election that went the Democrats’ way. But this weekend’s story in the Washington Post, based on testimony by Alberto Gonzales’s former deputy Kyle Sampson, suggests that McKay’s problems may have begun with his determination to keep on pushing to find Tom Wales’s killer.

In my earlier post on this rather snarkily referred to that notorious quote by Wayne Lapierre that the NRA would be working out of the white house if Bush were elected. But there is another clue from that period that lends credence to the suspicions that the Bush Justice Department would refuse to put resources toward finding his killer because of Wales’ position on guns.

December 6, 2001

The Justice Department has refused to let the F.B.I. check its records to determine whether any of the 1,200 people detained after the Sept. 11 attacks had bought guns, F.B.I. and Justice Department officials say.

The department made the decision in October after the F.B.I. asked to examine the records it maintains on background checks to see if any detainees had purchased guns in the United States.

Mindy Tucker, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said the request was rejected after several senior officials decided that the law creating the background check system did not permit the use of the records to investigate individuals.

We don’t know who the senior officials were, but they weren’t members of Ashcroft’s legal staff.

July 24, 2002

Congressional testimony by Attorney General John Ashcroft last December that the F.B.I. could not legally use records of gun background checks to investigate terrorism suspects conflicted with a formal opinion by his own legal staff, a report issued yesterday by the General Accounting Office shows.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Dec. 6, Mr. Ashcroft defended his policy of refusing to allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to check its records to determine whether any of the 1,200 people detained after Sept. 11 had bought guns. Mr. Ashcroft asserted that the law which created the National Instant Check System for gun purchases ”outlaws and bans” use in criminal investigations.

Mr. Ashcroft said the law ”indicates that the only permissible use for the National Instant Check System is to audit the maintenance of that system.”

But the General Accounting Office report contains an opinion by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, dated Oct. 1, which seems to allow the checks under some conditions. ”We see nothing in the NICS regulations that prohibits the F.B.I. from deriving additional benefits from checking audit log records as long as one of the genuine purposes” is auditing the use of the system, the report says.

Moreover, the Office of Legal Counsel added, it was further convinced such checks were legal because the bureau of investigation had been ”using this method” all along.

The opinion was written after the bureau asked the Justice Department for permission to examine the records on background checks to see if any detainees had purchased guns.

It is unclear who in the Justice Department read the opinion. But sometime in October, the department rejected the F.B.I.’s request.

We all know that they pretty much shredded every other amendment in the Bill Of Rights during that period, but even as Manhattan was still smoldering, they refused to buck the NRA and give the FBI permission to look over the firearm records. That is some powerful mojo. The NRA wouldn’t give an inch even to find terrorists in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Why would anyone think they’d be reluctant to put the screws to McKay in Washington because he kept trying to find the killer of a prosecutor who was a gun control advocate?

Of course they would. The NRA is the most powerful special interest in America and nobody is allowed to mess with their agenda. Nobody.

Update: Here are a bunch of article on the Wales case. It sure seems as if something is fishy.

.

Keeping It Close

by digby

I have said throughout the Bush years that Democrats suffered from the fact that we not only had to win, but we had to win big enough that the Republicans can’t steal it. In a country that is closely divided as ours has been throughout this period, particularly in important swing states, suppressing the Democratic vote was an excellent way for GOP crooks and cheaters to win.

Here’s McClatchy’s latest on Missouri:

Accusations about voter fraud seemed to fly from every direction in Missouri before last fall’s elections. State and national Republicans leaders fretted that dead people might vote or that some live people might vote more than once.

The threat to the integrity of the election was seen as so grave that Bradley Schlozman, the acting chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and later the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, twice wielded the power of the federal government to try to protect the balloting. The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly also stepped into action.

Now, six months after freshman Missouri Sen. Jim Talent’s defeat handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate, disclosures in the wake of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys show that that Republican campaign to protect the balloting was not as it appeared. No significant voter fraud was ever proved.

The preoccupation with ballot fraud in Missouri was part of a wider national effort that critics charge was aimed at protecting the Republican majority in Congress by dampening Democratic turnout. That effort included stiffer voter-identification requirements, wholesale purges of names from lists of registered voters and tight policing of liberal get-out-the-vote drives.

Bush administration officials deny those claims. But they’ve gotten traction in recent weeks because three of the U.S. attorneys ousted by the Justice Department charge that they lost their jobs because they failed to prove Republican allegations of voter fraud. They say their inquiries found little evidence to support the claims.

Few have endorsed the strategy of pursuing allegations of voter fraud with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove. And nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri.

With populations that don’t necessarily trust the authorities to be impartial even when the stakes are huge, asking them to run a gauntlet of legal hurdles in order to vote pretty much assures that quite a few of them won’t bother. In a cynical nation that can barely get a majority of its eligible citizens to vote anyway, you can potentially peel off a percentage or two just by making voting a pain in the neck.

You would think that nobody in his right mind would actually work to keep the country divided so they can steal elections, but you have to wonder if that played a factor in Rove’s “feed the base” legislative strategy,which Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson described in their book Off Center as a conscious choice to pass bills with as few members of the other party as possible — a highly unusual and perhaps unprecedented way of doing things. This was done ostensibly to deliver to a base that they believed was large enough to win elections on its own (with the help of a handful of faux moderates who were given “backlash insurance“) as well as keep the other side looking helpless and foolish as they could never quite win anything at all, thus demoralizing their own base.

I have no way of knowing, of course, but it would be in keeping with the hubristic and reflexively dishonest Rovian approach to politics if rather than seeking to truly create a governing majority, he consciously sought to keep the electorate very closely polarized so that he could both deliver to the base and keep them engaged — and also win those necessarily close elections through the most sophisticated voter suppression machine in history. (And yes, there were probably shenanigans with the voting machines as well.)

It’s only a crackpot theory, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The man always assumed he could keep a hundred balls in the air at once. Unfortunately, his president and vehicle for this new political machine was so inept at actual governance that the Democrats were able to win big enough in 2006 that he couldn’t steal it. And now they have subpoena power.

.

Long Term Strategery

by digby

Rick Perlstein has done a little bit of research on the Republican party as most of you know. Today, he reminds us just how deeply the GOP obsession with voter fraud in embedded in the GOP DNA:

Let me show you. Read this report from 1964, running down all the ways how Barry Goldwater’s Republican Party was working overtime to keep minorities from voting. The document can be found in the LBJ Library, where I researched my book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus:

John M Baley, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, charged today that “under the guise of setting up an apparatus to protect the sanctity of the ballot, the Republicans are actually creating the machinery for a carefully organized campaign to intimidate voters and to frighten members of minority groups from casing their ballots on November 3rd.

“‘Let’s get this straight,’ Bailey added, ‘the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confience in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration.

“‘But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. it is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place.

“‘We intend to see to it that the rights of these people are protected. We will have our people at the polling places–not to frighten or threaten anyone–but to protect the right of any eligible voter to cast a secret ballot without threats or intimidation.’

From the moment that the Voting Rights Act passed the Republicans have been working overtime to put roadblocks in front of it. Why they feel they cannot win without cheating is anybody’s guess. My personal theory is that they just believe they should do anything and everything, including cheating and stealing, to ensure that they keep their privileges and prerogatives in American society. That’s the glue that holds the racists, the businessmen and the conservative Christians together.

Read the rest of the post here. The more things change…

.

Job Description: Lighting Rod

by digby

Greg Palast, who has been writing about the “voter fraud” fraud for years, writes an interesting piece today arguing that Gonzales is irrelevant to the deeper problem within the DOJ with respect to voting rights.

I was struck particularly by this:

We’ve been here before. Gonzales is getting Libby’d. Takes the bullet for Karl Rove and the White House. If you wondered why the Republican jackals like the sinister Senator Specter piled on Gonzales — it’s because they were told to.

These guys learned from Richard Nixon. In 1973, when Nixon was getting hammered over Watergate, he threw the Senate Committee his Attorney General, a schmuck named Richard Kleindienst. Famously, Nixon’s own Rove, a devious creep named John Erlichman, told Nixon to leave the Attorney General, “twisting slowly in the wind.”

Rove and Bush are doing the Nixon Twist on Gonzales.

I think so too. When someone like Jeff Sessions is tearing into Gonzales, then you can bet money it’s a political strategy. That guy has never gone against the wingnut grain in his life.

When I read Palast’s piece it immediately reminded me of a Bush quote that I’ve always found to be illuminating:

During a trip to West Point on June 1, Bush pulled White aside for a private talk. “As long as they’re hitting you on Enron, they’re not hitting me,” said Bush, according to this Army official. “That’s your job. You’re the lightning rod for this administration.”

For all his faults, one of the hoariest myths about Bush that persists to this day is that he is loyal to a fault — one of those backhanded criticisms that actually makes him somewhat sympathetic. It’s nonsense. Bush uses people like kleenex, always has. He keeps people like Rummy and Gonzales around long after any other president would have because they serve a purpose —- reinforcing the idea that he is not personally responsible for anything that’s happened.

In this case, Gonzales keeps the eye off of Rove, Bush’s brain (and conscience.) The longer they leave him out there as degree of separation between the corruption of the DOJ and the white house, he serves his purpose. That’s why he hasn’t resigned and why Bush hasn’t asked for it. He’s doing his job.

Update: Here was the the dog that didn’t bite during the Libby trial:

Wells contended, it was Rove—the political strategist—who had to be protected at all costs. He was, Wells said, “the lifeblood of the Republican Party” and the man George W. Bush absolutely needed for the coming re-election campaign. Indeed, after [then-press secretary Scott] McClellan issued a public statement exonerating Rove of any involvement in the leak (a statement that turned out three years later to be false), Cheney and Libby huddled about the matter. McClellan had cleared Rove but at that point had said nothing about Libby, leaving the implication that Libby had leaked but Rove hadn’t. Cheney personally wrote a note, an excerpt of which Wells read to the jury and highlighted by displaying on an audio-visual machine during his opening statement: “Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others,” Cheney’s note read.

The translation, according to Wells: The vice president was not going to allow Karl Rove to be protected and Libby to be sacrificed…

The Libby defense ultimately didn’t go there for reasons nobody understands. But it does track nicely with the old “lightning rod” theory of governance, doesn’t it? Gonzales is getting the Libby treatment. I wonder how much he likes it.

.

Up To His Eyeballs

by digby

McClatchy:

After thousands of pages of documents and hours of testimony from Justice Department officials, it remains unknown who in the Bush administration conceived the plan to fire eight U.S. attorneys and why.

Gonzales’ testimony Thursday left senators convinced he wasn’t behind the plan or its execution and in fact knew far less than a department head should have about the details. Former and current members of Gonzales’ staff who’ve been interviewed by congressional investigators also have said their roles were limited or nonexistent.

Absent another explanation, the signs point to the White House and, at least in some degree, to the president’s political adviser, Karl Rove.

David Iglesias, the former New Mexico U.S. attorney and one of the eight fired last year, said investigating the White House’s role is the logical next step – one that would follow existing clues about Rove’s involvement.

“If I were Congress, I would say, `If the attorney general doesn’t have answers, then who would?’ There’s enough evidence to indicate that Karl Rove was involved up to his eyeballs.”

Iglesias said another clue that the White House may have been the driving force is the relative lack of Justice Department documentation for the firings in the 6,000 pages of documents turned over to Congress.

“If you want to justify getting rid of someone, you should have at least some paper trail,” Iglesias said. “There’s been a remarkable absence of that. I’m wondering if the paper trail is at the White House.”

Even if Gonzales decides to step down – he says he won’t despite widespread Republican disappointment with his performance – Democrats say they’ll continue their probe into whether politics inappropriately influenced the firings.

“The arrow points more and more to the White House,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. “The one thing I can assure you of: This is not over, far from it.”

If anyone wants to look at Rove’s involvement from another angle, there’s this one from Rick Hasen of the Election Law blog (who found the unethical “Publius” writings by ex DOJ staffer, FEC commissioner and GOP operative Hans von Spakovsky.)

This one is news to me. Via this story at the Brad Blog, it turns out that fired U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas Bud Cummins has alleged in this LA Times article and this article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that his firing may have had to do with an investigation of Missouri governor Matt Blunt and the law firm of Lathrop and Gage. The Dispatch: “Cummins” investigation had focused on Missouri’s openly political system of fee offices that dispense drivers licenses and license plates. The governor awards the contracts, which often go to political allies under a long-standing patronage system. Blunt had come under fire because his administration had privatized some state branches that dispensed the licenses and had allowed Lathrop & Gage to set up a behind-the-scenes system of private management firms that run dozens of offices.
On Oct. 4, Cummins announced that the investigation had concluded and that no charges were filed against anyone.” Cummins in the Los Angeles Times: “In an interview Thursday, Cummins expressed disgust that the Bush administration may have fired him and the others for political reasons. ‘You have to firewall politics out of the Department of Justice. Because once it gets in, people question every decision you make. Now I keep asking myself: ‘What about the Blunt deal?'”” The Brad Blog notes that a partner at the Lathrop and Gage firm is Thor Hearne, who headed American Center for Voting Rights (an organization that has mysteriously disappeared), which has been the main NGO pushing the argument that voter fraud was rampant was deserved investigation and new election administration rules, such as voter id laws.

.

The American Center for Voting Rights was a front group set up by the Republicans for the express purpose of testifying before congress about voter fraud. (I’m not kidding.) It’s web site has disappeared because it is no longer in service. But do yourself a favor and check out old Thor. Brad Friedman did a thorough job of documenting the atrocities some time back. When the Cummins thing was revealed last week he wrote:

I can’t underscore enough Hearne’s highly placed position as a White House operative, as the man behind the GOP’s entire, systematic, and well-financed “voter fraud” scheme/initiative (which has played directly into several of the other firings), his longtime efforts on behalf of and under the direct employ of MO Gov. Matt Blunt (son of the powerful GOP minority House Whip Roy Blunt), his position as a top attorney in the Republican National Lawyers Association (singled out by Rove during an April 2006 speech to that group of Republican election attorneys), and of course, as the national general counsel for Bush/Cheney ’04 Inc.

That’s right. Thor Hearne, the man who ran a GOP voter fraud front group was Bush’s national campaign lawyer in 2004.

Fired Up Missouri pulls all the pieces together here.

As I’ve said before, the entire vast right wing conspiracy can fit into a large hot tub. (I apologize for the unfortunate visual.)

Update: BTW, just last week a federal judge found that there was no evidence of voter fraud in Missouri either. Here’s what the Secretary of state had to say:

Yesterday in a statement, Carnahan said the ruling “concluded that my office not only complied with federal law but also went beyond its requirements through our many efforts to assist the county clerks and election boards with their responsibilities. The ruling also confirmed that there is no evidence of voter fraud in Missouri.

“This is the culmination of 18 months of an unnecessary, unwise and costly lawsuit by the Department of Justice,” Carnahan added…

waddaya know?

Update II: Raw Story reports that Alaska got one of those fabulous “interum prosecutors” too:

In an interview with the paper, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski admits that the Bush Administration “blindsinded” her with Cohen’s interim appointment, when her own picks, selected in consultation with fellow Republican Sen. Stevens, were rejected with no explanation after “a heck of a long time.”

“So it gets to the point where you’re thinking, ‘Wait a minute, this has been a heck of a long time. What is happening?’ And so the response to my inquiry is, ‘We still haven’t, there’s some issues,’ and ultimately what we got back was, ‘The picks were not acceptable by the White House,’ and yet no explanation as to why they’re not acceptable,'” Murkowski told the paper, adding that she first learned of Cohen’s appointment from a media report while the Senate was in recess last summer. “You just think, ‘It can’t be, wait.’ There was no consulting, no process, no nothing. That’s where I was certainly caught blindsided.”
.

Not Good Enough

by digby

I ran across this article in the course of researching the post below and I hadn’t seen it before. (Perhaps it’s been everywhere and I just missed it.) I found it pretty amazing:

Voter Probes Raise Partisan Suspicions
Democrats, Allies See Politics Affecting Justice Department’s Anti-Fraud Efforts

By Jo Becker and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 20, 2004

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias in New Mexico launched a statewide criminal task force to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the upcoming presidential election. The probe came after a sheriff who co-chairs President Bush’s campaign in the state’s largest county complained about thousands of questionable registrations turned in by Democratic-leaning groups.

“It appears that mischief is afoot and questions are lurking in the shadows,” Iglesias told local reporters.

Civil rights groups say Attorney General John D. Ashcroft’s focus on minority registrants is meant to deter likely Democratic voters.

But Democratic Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, named to the task force to allay concerns that the probe was politically motivated, said the investigation is unnecessary.

“This is just an attempt to let people know that Big Brother is watching,” Vigil-Giron, New Mexico’s chief elections official, said in an interview. “It may well be aimed at trying to keep people away from the polls.”

The probe is one of several criminal inquiries into alleged voter fraud launched in recent weeks in key presidential battlegrounds, including Ohio and West Virginia, as part of a broader initiative by U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft targeting bogus registrations and other election crimes. The Justice Department has asked U.S. attorneys across the country to meet with local elections officials and launch publicity campaigns aimed at getting people to report irregularities.

The focus on registration problems comes amid a fiercely contested presidential race and at a time when many Democrats are still angry over the 2000 election, in which ballot irregularities in Florida prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the winner. And it puts the Justice Department in the middle of a charged and partisan debate over when aggressive fraud enforcement becomes intimidation.

Justice officials say it is the department’s duty to prosecute illegal activities at the polls, and stress that civil rights lawyers are also working to ensure that legitimate voters can cast their ballots without interference. Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said that “the department must strike a proper balance and we cannot be deterred from investigating allegations of criminal voter fraud.”

Civil rights advocates and many Democrats, however, complain that the department is putting too much emphasis on investigating new voter registrations in poor and minority communities — which tend to favor Democrats — and not enough on ensuring that those voters do not face discrimination at the polls. More attention should be given to potential fraud in the use of absentee ballots, which tend to favor Republicans, the critics say.

They also charge that announcing criminal investigations within weeks of an election — as was done in New Mexico on Sept. 7 — is likely to scare legitimate voters away from the polls.

“I’m concerned that the Justice Department is being overtly political,” said Nancy Zirkin, deputy director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. “Bells are going off for me because searching for voter fraud has often been a proxy for intimidating voters.”

The Justice Department’s guidelines say prosecutors “must refrain from any conduct which has the possibility of affecting the election itself.”

Iglesias did what he was supposed to do in 2004 like a good Republican boy. He held press conferences just before the election and and said all the right things about “questions lurking in the shadows.” Except, of course, the questions were all trumped up GOP scare tactics to keep Hispanics and native Americans from voting. Not illegal, just low and snakelike.

Unfortunately for him, by 2006, Rove was panicking and that wasn’t good enough. He was supposed to actually indict somebody (see: Wisconsin) and he refused. He got his head chopped off.

.

Hans Across America

by digby

Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been writing about the same things over and over again for years and it never adds up to anything. But in the case of this “voter fraud” issues, I have been concerned about what the Bush administration was up to for some time and it appears to be adding up to something quite huge. (Of course, I’m not the only one who was following this — many people knew it was happening.)

Today, McClatchy has a barn burner of an article about the Bush administration’s efforts to suppress the vote. It’s no longer possible to argue with a straight face that they didn’t use the power of the Justice Department for partisan reasons. The Bush administration has been pursuing phony voter fraud like it was a massive scourge, helping states enact all kinds of specious laws that only result in disenfranchising legitimate voters — the kind who tend to vote Democratic. (I wonder why?)

Read the whole article and then come on back and we’ll unpack just a tiny little piece of it, blog style.

Longtime readers will recall that way back when I wrote a bit about “Buckhead” the man who miraculously discovered in a few short moments that the kerning and fonts of the Dan Rather memos were “off” and put his “findings” up on Free Republic. You all know the results of his magnificent bit of internet sleuthing. In researching Buckhead, whose real name is Harry McDougal, I found out that in addition to being a member of the Federalist Society and someone who helped write anti-Clinton briefs for Kenneth Starr, he was a member of the Fulton County elections board which ruled that the extremely dubious Sonny Perdue and Saxby Chambliss wins in 2002 were perfectly a-ok. The guy got around.

It turned out that another interesting Republican fellow had previously been on that elections board by the name of Hans von Spakovsky, whom you just read about in that McClatchy piece. He was hired by the Bush Justice Department’s civil right’s division shortly after his stint down in Florida during the recount. Anyway, Von Spakovsky is not just another Atlanta lawyer. He had for years been involved with a GOP front group called the “Voter Integrity Project” (VIP) which was run by none other than Helen Blackwell, wife of notorious conservative operative Morton Blackwell. (Many of you will remember him as the guy who handed out the “purple heart” bandages at the 2004 GOP convention but he’s actually much better known for years of running the dirty tricks school “The Leadership Institute” and is even credited with coining the name “Moral Majority.” Let’s just say he’s been a playah in GOP circles for a long time — and the VIP is one of his projects.

Salon published a piece on the Voter Integrity Project back in 2000:

VIP chairwoman of the board is Helen Blackwell, also the Virginia chairwoman of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, whose husband, Morton, serves as executive director of the conservative Council for National Policy. It took lumps for being partisan earlier this year from Slate writer Jeremy Derfner. “In fact, almost everything about the Voting Integrity Project makes you wonder. Though VIP’s members assert that they are both independent and nonpartisan, the organization is essentially a conservative front,” Derfner wrote.

VIP has vigorously opposed efforts to liberalize voting procedures — railing against everything from Internet voting to Oregon’s mail-in balloting to the Motor Voter bill. But it is VIP’s involvement in partisan political fights that makes Democrats charge the group is a Republican front group.

VIP sent investigators into largely black areas in Louisiana after Mary Landrieu’s 1996 U.S. Senate victory over Republican Woody Jenkins.

“The VIP conducted its investigation over a 10-day period from December 26 through January 4, during which time they concentrated on the Orleans Parish voting activities,” a VIP release says. “The VIP examined and independently verified substantial amounts of evidence gathered by the Jenkins campaign, as well as gathering its own evidence concerning vote buying, vote hauling and improprieties by elections officials tasked with protecting voting machines.”

VIP chairwoman Helen Blackwell told the Senate Rules Committee, “Many claims of the Jenkins campaign have merit and should be investigated to the fullest extent of the law.”

In a few short years, former VIP lawyer Von Spakovsky, who had made his name calling for voter roll purges in Georgia, was working in the Justice Department, with the full resources of the federal government behind him.

From the McClatchy article:

In late 2001, Ashcroft also hired three Republican political operatives to work in a secretive new unit in the division’s Voting Rights Section. Rich said the unit, headed by unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Mark Metcalf of Kentucky, bird-dogged the progress of the administration’s Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and reviewed voting legislation in the states.

One member of the three-person political unit, former Georgia elections official and Republican activist Hans von Spakovsky, eventually took de facto control of the Voting Rights Section and used his position to advocate tougher voter ID laws, said former department lawyers who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals.

Those former employees said that Spakovsky helped state officials interpret the Help America Vote Act’s confusing new minimum voter identification requirements. He also weighed in when the Voting Rights Act required department approval for any new ID law in 13 states with histories of racial discrimination.

In November 2004, Arizona residents passed Proposition 200, the toughest state voter ID law to date, which requires applicants to provide proof of citizenship and voters to produce a photo ID on Election Day. The Voting Rights Act state requires states to show that such laws wouldn’t impede minorities from voting and gives the Justice Department 60 days to approve or oppose them.

Career voting rights specialists in the Justice Department soon discovered that more than 2,000 elderly Indians in Arizona lacked birth certificates, and they sought their superiors’ approval to request more information from the state about other potential impacts on voters’ rights. Spakovsky and Sheldon Bradshaw, the division’s top deputy and a close friend of top Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, a former Bush White House lawyer, denied the request, said one of the former department attorneys.

Jeffrey Toobin wrote an article back in 2004 about this subject which everyone who is following this case should read (or re-read) to see just how pervasive this “voter fraud” initiative was in the Bush Justice department. Karl Rove was almost certainly running it from the white house. But it was being pushed from throughout the Republican establishment that had recognized for years that they couldn’t win fair and square. I think 2000 scared the hell out of them. If it hadn’t been for Ralph Nader and Jebby and Poppy’s political machines they would have lost that one and they had put everything they had into winning it.

So where is our friend Von Spakovsky now?

Saturday, December 17, 2005

President Bush nominated two controversial lawyers to the Federal Election Commission yesterday: Hans von Spakovsky who helped Georgia win approval of a disputed voter-identification law, and Robert D. Lenhard, who was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Von Spakovsky and Mason are Republican appointees, while Lenhard and Walther are Democratic picks for the bipartisan six-member commission.

In a letter to Senate Rules Committee Chairman Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) wrote that he is “extremely troubled” by the von Spakovsky nomination. Kennedy contends that von Spakovsky “may be at the heart of the political interference that is undermining the [Justice] Department’s enforcement of federal civil laws.”

Career Justice Department lawyers involved in a Georgia case said von Spakovsky pushed strongly for approval of a state program requiring voters to have photo identification. A team of staff lawyers that examined the case recommended 4 to 1 that the Georgia plan should be rejected because it would harm black voters; the recommendation was overruled by von Spakovsky and other senior officials in the Civil Rights Division.

Before working in the Justice Department, von Spakovsky was the Republican Party chairman in Fulton County, Ga., and served on the board of the Voter Integrity Project, which advocated regular purging of voter roles to prevent felons from casting ballots.

In a brief telephone interview, von Spakovsky played down his role in policy decisions in the Civil Rights Division. “I’m just a career lawyer who works in the front office of civil rights,” he said. He noted that the department has rules against career lawyers talking to reporters.

That takes some gall, don’t you think? He actually tried to pass himself off as a career lawyer for the justice department when he was nothing but a political hack from the moment he hit DC. Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Bush gave him a recess appointment a month later. A couple of months after that, this came out

I’m sure everyone is aware by now that the recent study by the NY Times pretty much takes voter fraud off the table as anything but a partisan Republican tool for suppressing the Democratic vote:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Frankly you had to be something of an historical illiterate not to recognize from the beginning that these folks are up to the same tricks they’ve been using for decades. They tried mightily, with everything they had, the federal government, the Republican Lawyers Association, the country awash in patriotic paranoia, and they still couldn’t prove this case — even crookedly they couldn’t do it. In fact, their insistence on finding it where there was none is what has caused their whole edifice to crumble.

Oh, and by the way, von Spakovsky has now been formally nominated by Bush to the FEC and will have to undergo Senate confirmation. Here’s a blistering critique of his performace at the DOJ as well as his predictably awful tenure on the FEC from a former attoreny in the civil rights division. He concludes:

But even putting aside his controversial tenure at DOJ, von Spakovsky’s performance at the FEC over the last year independently raises questions of whether he is worthy of Senate confirmation. His comments at FEC meetings have often been caustic and extraneous to the issue at hand. He has consistently scoffed at the spirit of campaign finance laws, thumbing his nose at the law as he seeks to help create routes of circumvention. He even accuses those reformers who seek regulation of the role of money in our political process as attempting to take us back to the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This is an easy accusation to make, and von Spakovsky has employed it a number of times, and it certainly is easier to attack those he disagrees with rather than to explain principled reasons for his own actions.

The Senate Rules Committee hearings will begin soon. When they do, the American people have the right to know all the details of von Spakovsky’s roles in both the Texas and Georgia matters, and his handling of FEC matters as a recess appointee. That record, if compiled, will make the vote on his confirmation quite easy.

Let’s hope so.

.

Laying The Foundation

by digby

TPM points to this post by Josh Green referring to his 2003 piece referencing Karl Rove’s history of crying “voter fraud.” As it happens, some of you may remember that I flagged Green’s piece back in March to illustrate the same point — that while “voter fraud” has long been a GOP rallying cry to explain why nobody likes them, Rove has made a career out of using it to steal elections.

I felt before the last election that Rove was preparing a full-on voter fraud challenge if the numbers were close enough in key states. But the GOP was just too damned unpopular everywhere to even try to steal it. Had this US Attorney scandal not turned this rock over and revealed the the festering politics beneath, this plan would have gone forward for 2008.

To fully understand how they were laying the groundwork among the wingnuts, here’s that nice lady, Howard Kurtz’s new bff, writing for the racist organization VDARE back in 2004:

The Illegal Alien Swing Vote

By Michelle Malkin The right to vote is precious, the politicians preach. Our democracy hangs in the balance, the pundits screech. Yes, but if we all value the sanctity of the voting process so highly, why is it that I’ve never once been asked to produce identification of any kind in the 16 years I’ve been a voter, from Ohio to California to Washington State to Maryland? And why is it that we can’t protect our elections from people who have no right to vote, no right to be here, and no right to undermine our safety or sovereignty? While unhinged Democrats spread fear about the alleged discriminatory disenfranchisement of American citizens, they have supported the indiscriminate enfranchisement of untold numbers of foreign outlaws—including suspected al Qaeda operatives and terrorist sympathizers. Last week, the Columbus Dispatch reported that illegal alien Nuradin Abdi—the suspected shopping mall bomb plotter from Somalia—was registered to vote in the battleground state of Ohio by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a left-wing activist group. Also on the Ohio voting rolls: convicted al Qaeda agent Iyman Faris, who planned to sabotage the Brooklyn Bridge and had entered the country fraudulently from Pakistan on a student visa.[ “Long gone but still registered Ohio’s Election Day rolls include people who couldn’t—and shouldn’t—vote ,October 24, 2004, Jon Craig The Columbus Dispatch“] In the battleground state of Florida, indicted terror suspect Sami Al-Arian illegally cast his ballot in a Tampa referendum in 1994 while his citizenship application was pending. He claimed the unlawful vote was the result of a “misunderstanding.” State officials declined to prosecute. You’ve heard about those satirical “10 out of 10 terrorists agree: Anybody But Bush” bumper stickers? There may be more truth to them than you think. John Fund, author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, reports that at least eight of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were eligible to vote in Virginia or Florida while they plotted to kill Americans. What’s to stop the next foreign terrorist plotter from casting a tainted ballot in the nation he has sworn to destroy? Not much. According to the Franklin County Board of Elections, the Dispatch reports, the office simply “takes a person’s word, that they’re (sic) a U.S. citizen.” In the battleground state of Wisconsin, the story is the same for those who are responsible for registering other people to vote. Not only do we regularly do nothing to verify the citizenship of people voting, but we also shrug our shoulders at the citizenship status of election workers. I recently obtained a disturbing set of investigative reports from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), outlining how the city of Racine neglects to ask deputy registrar applicants for identification or proof of citizenship. FAIR’s investigation also alleges that a deputy registrar in Racine registered two individuals—one posing as an admitted illegal alien—and reportedly advised them to lie on their forms. The report notes that the deputy registrar—working for the open borders lobbying group, Voces de la Frontera—then gave the couple information on other illegal alien benefits, including employment rights and bank accounts. Law enforcement officials in Wisconsin—which has been swamped with voter fraud shenanigans—have copies of the report, affidavits from the couple who dealt with the registrar, and recordings of their conversations. But no action, if any, is likely until after the Nov. 2 election. Democrats at the state and federal levels have aggressively courted the illegal alien swing vote. The most-egregious example, of course, was the taxpayer-funded Citizenship USA program under the Clinton-Gore administration, which abandoned criminal background checks to naturalize 1.3 million immigrants (including scores of criminal alien felons) in time for the 1996 elections. Ethnic and racial grievance groups, with backing from the likes of Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, have forcefully opposed basic ID requirements at the polls. And they have armies of lawyers standing by to assist them. Responsible election officials who ask for proof of citizenship will be accused of “harassment” and “intimidation.” They will be accused of causing a “chilling effect”—never mind the corrosive effect of unchecked illegal alien voter fraud on law, order, and the integrity of our electoral system. Political correctness cost us 3,000 lives on Sept. 11. It may cost us an election on Nov. 2.

You will, of course, note that she specifically talks about Wisconsin where massive pressure was brought to bear against the US Attorney there to bring indictments. Indeed, in the last few days it’s become known that he may have been on the list to be fired for failing to “make it work”, but for reasons about which we can only speculate (a well-timed political show trial) he was allowed to keep his job.

This article in today’s NY Times shows definitively that even with the full force of the White House pressuring people to come up with evidence of voter fraud, there just isn’t much to find.

It doesn’t address the real dangers however, which Malkin in her infinite wisdom sees so clearly:

What’s to stop the next foreign terrorist plotter from casting a tainted ballot in the nation he has sworn to destroy?

It’s one short step from terrorism to fraudulently voting for Democrats. My God, these barbarians will stop at nothing.

.