Fraud

The only "fraud" about the issue of voter fraud is the fraud perpetrated on the people of this country. The New York Times has dug into this issue over the last couple days and hasn't found a damn thing.

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.

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.

White House officials will tell you that there is a deliberate effort to go after voter fraud. What they won't tell you, which Josh Marshall and the Times will, is that most of these cases are either mistakes my immigrants, a lack of proper purging from the rolls that doesn't lead to multiple votes, or people gathering voter registrations who put in fake names to collect more money, which also never results in multiple votes. This is a massive effort to find a crime that doesn't exist. And the goal is to subvert confidence in elections, and give a pretext to suppress the vote. Here's Josh:

Republican party officials and elected officials use bogus claims of vote fraud to do three things: 1) to stymie voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in poor and minority neighborhoods, 2) purge voter rolls of legitimate voters and 3) institute voter ID laws aimed at making it harder for low-income and minority voters to vote.

This sounds like hyperbole but it is simply the truth. (A great example of this in microcosm was the 2002 senate election in South Dakota -- Johnson v. Thune -- in which Republicans spent the entire election ranting about a massive voter fraud conspiracy on the state's Indian reservations, charges which turned out to be completely bogus but had the aim of keeping voting down on the reservations.

The power of the Justice Department has been mustered to meet these political goals. Ultimately, this is a large part of why the US Attorneys were fired, and more important, why others were retained. Tom Maguire of Just One Minute commented here about the Steven Biskupic case, saying that the timeline was "way off" and that the US Attorney for Wisconsin did not indict an aide to Gov. Jim Doyle to affect the election. Apparently, you can't time indictments so that the much more impactful conviction and sentencing comes when you want it. But there was more at work here; Biskupic may have been on the edge of getting fired and needed to prove his loyal Bushitude:

Iglesias and Biskupic were the only U.S. attorneys in the country to have launched task forces to investigate voter fraud in the 2004 elections. There's arguably not another U.S. attorney in the country to have so thoroughly investigated such allegations. A review of Biskupic's manifold efforts demonstrates that without a doubt.

Despite that fact, Karl Rove and President Bush himself passed along complaints to Alberto Gonzales in October 2006 about Biskupic's and Iglesias' performance on voter fraud. Iglesias was fired. Biskupic, for some reason, wasn't. But it looks like it was a very close call.

Read the whole thing. It's clear that Biskupic was feeling the heat prior to January 2006, when he indicted Georgia Thompson. He was getting letters demanding voter fraud prosecutions in late 2005.

Voter fraud doesn't exist at any meaningful level. This is being ginned up by Republicans for purely political motives, and the Justice Department is being used as a tool in that political game. In fact, a panel report investigating voter fraud was altered by the administration, changing the text to read that it was "open to debate" instead of infinitesimal in scope. It's like changing the global warming reports. This is an absolute scandal. And you can't understand the US Attorney probe without it.