Personal About Politics: Voter Fraud - Where and By Whom?

     
The McCain campaign has been pounding away at Obama’s supposedly lethal link to ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, even so far as John McCain alluding in the last debate that the organization “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Sorry, that distinction goes to the GOP in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. It would be difficult to top the fraud perpetrated by the GOP in Florida, where then Secretary of State Katherine Harris rolled over for her Republican party, single handedly disenfranchised voters and handed the White House to her boss’s family, practically gift-wrapped. But, top it they did in Ohio in 2004.

Here are some of the disturbing reports and investigations that came out of Ohio following the 2004 election.

While speaking to the New York Society for Ethical Culture on December 7, 2004, Greg Palast said, “While investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the Republican Party's confidential "caging lists," their title for the spreadsheets that list the names and addresses of Ohio voters they intended to block on any pretext. Every address of the thousands on these Republican hit lists was located in black-majority precincts. You might find that nasty and racist. It may also be a crime.

“Through deceitful manipulation of information and equipment, the citizens of Ohio were often turned away from voting booths,” he continued.  (Greg Palast)

It was also discovered that the voting firm Triad sought to thwart the recount of paper ballots in Cincinnati, to foreclose finding any discrepancy between the hand count and the machine count. Alarmingly, Traid could and did access the voting machines remotely to tabulate the votes. This was done by computer over the Internet leaving the voting machines exposed to virtually everyone. (whatreallyhappened.com)

Finally, as reported in the RAW STORY Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell boasted of helping "deliver" Ohio for President Bush and said he was "truly pleased" to announce Bush had won Ohio even before all of the state's votes had been counted in his own fundraising letter. The letter, which was received by a Butler County resident Dec. 31, 2004, is a plea to support Blackwell's campaign for governor. The resident asked to remain anonymous.


The GOP wrote the playbook on voter disenfranchisement and have fine-tuned it each election cycle. Why are they crying foul regarding ACORN? Distraction. Cover-up. Cry foul on the other side first and hopefully nobody will notice your hand in the cookie jar.

Since 2000 the GOP has been relentless in its effort to disenfranchise American citizens who have the right to vote, but tend to live in Democratic districts. They have used faulty voting machines, sent false information to potential voters, turned voters away from polling sites and in some cases, used outright intimidation. They have gotten really good at vote tampering.

ACORN, in particular, has been a Republican target in 2002, 2004, 2006 and now again in 2008. Why do they keep attacking ACORN like a rabid squirrel? It’s an easy target, since their sole purpose is to register voters, and also because they probably can’t really find any hint of voter fraud by the Democrats.

Remember the 11 US attorneys fired en masse back in 2006? David Iglesias, the former US attorney for New Mexico, was among those fired after he refused to prosecute what turned out to be unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud against ACORN. (The Public Record)

In his book, In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration, Iglesias, as recounted by Jason Leopold of The Public Record, said “the Department of Justice aggressively pushed him and other US attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, an issue the former US attorney says the DOJ became unusually obsessed with.”


"The e-mail imperatives came again in 2004 and 2006, by which time I had learned that far from being standard operating procedure for the Justice Department, the emphasis on voter irregularities was unique to the Bush administration," Iglesias wrote.


Iglesias says that Republican officials in his state were far less interested in election reforms and more intent on suppressing votes.



"But there was a more sinister reading to such urgent calls for reform, not to mention the Justice Department's strident insistence on harvesting a bumper crop of voter fraud prosecutions.”


"Not only did the [Bush] administration stoop to such seamy expedients to press its agenda in 2004," Iglesias wrote. "It had the full might and authority of the federal government and its prosecutorial powers to accomplish its ends."

Republicans repeatedly wave the “fraud” flag as a fear and diversionary tactic, but how widespread is real voter fraud? Studies have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is extremely rare.  According to a recent analysis by Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Barnard College, federal courts found only 24 voters guilty of fraud from 2002 to 2005, out of hundreds of millions of votes caste. “The claim of widespread voter fraud,” Minnite says, “is itself a fraud.” (Rolling Stone)

David Iglesias continued in that same vein when he said, “They (Bush Administration) wanted some splashy pre-election indictments that would scare these alleged hordes of illegal voters away. We took over 100 complaints and investigated for almost two years – but I didn’t fine one prosecutable case of voter fraud in the entire state of New Mexico.

The above statements came from an article called Block the Vote written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palat published in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine. It is an eye-opening and frightening missive. Rolling Stone thought the information so important they have allowed it to be read in its entirety online. You can find it at rollingstone.com.

According to Kennedy and Palast, suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP’s electoral strategy.

One startling, but unfortunately common example, took place on Super Tuesday in New Mexico. Last February 5th, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county's voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast "provisional" ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats.  

Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission's own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from "unreadability" to changes in a voter's signature.

In case after case, Republican election officials at the local and state level have used the rules to give GOP candidates an edge on Election Day by creating new barriers to registration, purging legitimate names from voter rolls, challenging voters at the polls and discarding valid ballots.

Kennedy and Palast list these as the recently enacted barriers thrown up to deter voters:

•    Obstructing Voter-Registration Drives. Since 2004, the Bush administration and more than a dozen states have taken steps to impede voter registration. Among the worst offenders is Florida, where the Republican-dominated legislature created hefty fines — up to $5,000 per violation — for groups that fail to meet deadlines for turning in voter-application forms.

•    Demanding “Perfect Matches”. Under this rigid framework, new registrants can lose the right to vote if the information on their voter-registration forms — Social Security number, street address and precisely spelled name, right down to a hyphen — fails to exactly match data listed in other government records. In a recent study it was found most errors were typing mistakes made by government clerks when they transcribe data. Those typos cost a citizen the right to vote.

•    Purging Legitimate Voters From the Rolls HAVA (Help America Vote Act) requires that records be centralized, computerized and maintained by secretaries of state — partisan officials — who are empowered to purge the rolls of any voter they deem ineligible. All told, states reported scrubbing at least 10 million voters from their rolls on questionable grounds between 2004 and 2006.

•    Requiring Unnecessary Voter ID’s Even if voters run the gauntlet of the new registration laws, they can still be blocked at the polling station.

•    Rejecting “Spoiled” Ballots The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in its investigation of the 2000 returns from Florida, found that African-Americans were nearly 10 times more likely than whites to have their ballots rejected, a ratio that holds nationwide. In 2004, the number of spoiled ballots in New Mexico — 19,000 — was three times George Bush's margin of victory.

•    Challenging “Provisional” Ballots In 2004, an estimated 3 million voters who showed up at the polls were refused regular ballots because their registration was challenged on a technicality. Instead, these voters were handed "provisional" ballots, a fail-safe measure mandated by HAVA to enable officials to review disputed votes. But for many officials, resolving disputes means tossing ballots in the trash. In 2004, a third of all provisional ballots — as many as 1 million votes — were simply thrown away at the discretion of election officials.

The GOP has already been actively using these tactics in several states. The New York Times reported that “About 6,000 new voters in Colorado may not be allowed to cast regular ballots on Election Day because they failed to check a box on a voter registration form.”

Voter registration groups say that officials with Secretary of State Mike Coffman’s office specifically told them the box did NOT need to be checked.

Adding to the confusion, Mr. Coffman has had to correct an earlier letter from his office that named a wrong date by which new voters needed to correct incomplete forms.

Coffman is a Republican.

The Ohio Republican Party sued Jennifer Brunner, Ohio’s Secretary of State – a Democrat - to turn over lists of voters whose names did not match those on government databases to local election officials. Once they have the names, they may require these voters to cast provisional ballots rather than regular ballots. As documented by Kennedy and Palast, most provisional ballots are tossed.

A lower court ruled in favor of the GOP, but Brunner took it to the Supreme Court who ruled in her favor. The Republicans immediately filed another lawsuit using an individual’s name.

And in California, Mark Jacoby, owner of a firm hired by the state GOP to register voters was arrested over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud. The Los Angeles Times reported that dozens of voters complained they were duped by the firm into switching their party registration to Republican while being told they were signing a petition for tougher penalties on child molesters. 



The switches could impede Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts and could prevent those affected from voting in next year's Democratic primaries. Some of the voters were even switched to absentee status, meaning they could lose their vote entirely if they show up at the polls on Election Day without bringing an absentee ballot.


So while McCain is yelling “Fraud” and “ACORN” as a distraction, Republicans are engaging in strong-arm tactics to put up barriers and disenfranchise as many voters as possible. Confusion is their friend.

As Hector Balderas, state auditor of New Mexico said in Block the Vote, “As a strategic consideration there are those that benefit from chaos at the ballot box.”

Can the GOP pull off the greatest voter “fraud” in U.S history? We’ll know two weeks from today. 



                                       
Cheri Cabot, Politics Correspondent
Cheri’s column, “Personal About Politics,” published every week, will reflect on how the life of a 59 year-old, middle class woman is affected by politics, policy and the current state of the nation - a look at the personal aspects of politics. The articles will be posted to Politics.gather.com as part of Gather Essentials.

Cheri is a freelance writer, living in Southern California.  She has two grown children, one in Iowa and one at Columbia University, and is the proud grandmother of two. Cheri is also a purveyor of fine coffee, warm chatter and dry wit.

You can find all of Cheri’s columns on Personal About Politics at www.personalpolitcs.gather.com, or www.ccabot.gather.com.