The Great Voter Fraud Swindle - Missouri in 2006

The Republican goal of pushing baseless voter fraud investigations as a means to suppress turnout, particularly minority turnout, has a long and ignominious history. They have used intimidation and fear to keep voters away from the polls, voters that have felt the force of justice administrated upon them disproportionately. The idea is to harrass, frighten, and confuse voters so that they will not want to involve themselves in the electoral process, for their own safety and personal liberty more than anything else.

This 40-year history, which includes the participation of a former Supreme Court Chief Justice and thousands of well-connected GOP operatives, have continued in the efforts of the Bush Administration's Justice Department, particularly in Missouri, where the GOP tried to save their Senate majority by using the US Attorney office and legislative arms to prosecute false voter fraud claims, maintain laws devoted to voter suppression, purge voter lists and police perfectly legal GOTV operations.

First, the history. This is from 1964:

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.'

Bailey said the Republican program, called "Operation Eagle Eye," is really "a program to cut down the vote in predominantly Democratic areas by harassing, frightening, and confusing the voters."

This is from 2006:

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.

Before last fall's election:

• (Bradley) Schlozman, while he was acting civil rights chief, authorized a suit accusing the state of failing to eliminate legions of ineligible people from lists of registered voters. A federal judge tossed out the suit this April 13, saying Democratic Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan couldn't police local registration rolls and noting that the government had produced no evidence of fraud.

• The Missouri General Assembly - with the White House's help - narrowly passed a law requiring voters to show photo identification cards, which Carnahan estimated would disenfranchise 200,000 voters. The state Supreme Court voided the law as unconstitutional before the election.

• Two weeks before the election, the St. Louis Board of Elections sent letters threatening to disqualify 5,000 newly registered minority voters if they failed to verify their identities promptly, a move - instigated by a Republican appointee - that may have violated federal law. After an outcry, the board rescinded the threat.

• Five days before the election, Schlozman, then interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, announced indictments of four voter-registration workers for a Democratic-leaning group on charges of submitting phony applications, despite a Justice Department policy discouraging such action close to an election.

• In an interview with conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt a couple of days before the election, Rove said he'd just visited Missouri and had met with Republican strategists who "are well aware of" the threat of voter fraud. He said the party had "a large number of lawyers that are standing by, trained and ready to intervene" to keep the election clean.

I want to focus in on Bradley Schlozman and his efforts to continue the voter suppression in Missouri that he began in the civil rights department of the DoJ. The indictments of the ACORN recruiters five days before the election is a violation of Justice Department rules, which explicitly state that USAs should not bring election-related cases to an indictment directly preceding an election. The case was about ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) registering minority voters in Kansas City during 2006. There doesn't seem to be much to the allegations that this was in any way wrong, other than the fact that they were registering minority voters. Registering fake voters is a crime, but those fake voters are not in any way able to vote, and there is no evidence that anyone has used any of those names at the polls. And in fact, the lead investigators on any potential fraud was ACORN itself:

According to Elyshya Miller, ACORN's head organizer for Kansas City, ACORN identified certain forms as potentially fraudulent and turned them over to prosecutors in late October; four organizers were responsible. A week later, all four organizers were indicted by a grand jury.

But in their evident haste to indict, the prosecutors made a mistake -- they indicted the wrong person. Three weeks after the election, Schlozman's office dropped the charges against one of the defendants, Stephanie Davis, admitting that her identity was used without her permission. It was not until January of this year that Schlozman's office finally indicted one Caren Davis, who was apparently the person they were really after. Caren Davis' lawyer Dana Altieri told me that Davis is currently undergoing a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether she is competent to stand trial.

But let's look at the indicted crimes themselves. The four defendants were accused of forging the registration forms for a grand total of six voters (Caren Davis was responsible for three). In some cases, the defendants simply made people up; others forged the registrations for real people.

Schlozman claimed this was a "national investigation," but he was the only US Attorney in the country to bring charges in 2006. He was appointed using the Patriot Act provision that circumvented Senate confirmation, replacing a USA that was previously on DoJ purge lists. Schlozman was installed to push voter fraud investigations and intimidate minority voters; but also there's the additional tidbit that his predecessor Todd Graves was investigating Medicare fraud cases, and Schlozman put a stop to that. Elsewhere, attempts to look into a particular Medicare-fraud case, involving Novation LLC, ended with a series of mysterious accidental deaths.

With Schlozman's job done after the election (and unsuccessfully, I might add), he went right back to the DoJ, to become an "attorney in the Counsel to the Director staff at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys." By the way, Schlozman's replacement, John Wood, is a former OMB general counsel, as well as ICE head Julie Myers' husband. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

When we look back at the events in Missouri - especially the mystery USA that swooped into town, investigated all kinds of voter fraud investigations, and then just as quickly swooped out - you can only conclude that this is the continuation of 40 years of suppressing minority voters to dampen the Democratic vote. In Missouri it was the US Attorney's office, but also the entire GOP delegation in the state, who publicized voter fraud allegations, created photo ID laws designed to suppress the vote, and did everything they could to stop minorities from casting a ballot. This is the nub of the entire US Attorneys scandal - it was a political plan to create a Republican majority.