Text 4146, 251 rader
Skriven 2007-04-20 08:20:00 av ROSS SAUER
Ärende: "Voter fraud?"
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Face it, the Bush GOP can only win by cheating.

Administration pursued aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout
By Greg Gordon

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice 
Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort 
to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor 
Republican political candidates. 

The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's 
popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle 
for control of Congress, which the Democrats won. 

Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning 
groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and 
endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification 
laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy 
in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the 
Republican National Lawyers Association. 

Questions about the administration's campaign against alleged voter 
fraud have helped fuel the political tempest over the firings last year 
of eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom were ousted in part because 
they failed to bring voter fraud cases important to Republican 
politicians. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales could shed more light on 
the reasons for those firings when he appears Thursday before the Senate 
Judiciary Committee. 

Civil rights advocates charge that the administration's policies were 
intended to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority 
voters who tend to support Democrats, and by filing state and federal 
lawsuits, civil rights groups have won court rulings blocking some of 
its actions. 

Justice Department spokesperson Cynthia Magnuson called any allegation 
that the department has rolled back minority voting rights 
"fundamentally flawed." 

She said the department has "a completely robust record when it comes to 
enforcing federal voting rights laws," citing its support last year for 
reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the filing of at least 
20 suits to ensure that language services are available to non-English 
speaking voters. 

The administration, however, has repeatedly invoked allegations of 
widespread voter fraud to justify tougher voter ID measures and other 
steps to restrict access to the ballot, even though research suggests 
that voter fraud is rare. 

Since President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, a former 
Republican senator from Missouri, launched a "Ballot Access and Voter 
Integrity Initiative" in 2001, Justice Department political appointees 
have exhorted U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, and the 
department's Civil Rights Division has sought to roll back policies to 
protect minority voting rights. 

On virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting 
since 2001, the division's Voting Rights Section has come down on the 
side of Republicans, notably in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, 
Washington and other states where recent elections have been decided by 
narrow margins. 

Joseph Rich, who left his job as chief of the section in 2005, said 
these events formed an unmistakable pattern. 

"As more information becomes available about the administration's 
priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, 
the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are 
part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority 
citizens," he said. 

Former department lawyers, public records and other documents show that 
since Bush took office, political appointees in the Civil Rights 
Division have: 

-Approved Georgia and Arizona laws that tightened voter ID requirements. 
A federal judge tossed out the Georgia law as an unconstitutional 
infringement on the rights of poor voters, and a federal appeals court 
signaled its objections to the Arizona law on similar grounds last fall, 
but that litigation was delayed by the U.S. Supreme Court until after 
the election. 

-Issued advisory opinions that overstated a 2002 federal election law by 
asserting that it required states to disqualify new voting registrants 
if their identification didn't match that in computer databases, 
prompting at least three states to reject tens of thousands of 
applicants mistakenly. 

-Done little to enforce a provision of the 1993 National Voter 
Registration Act that requires state public assistance agencies to 
register voters. The inaction has contributed to a 50 percent decline in 
annual registrations at those agencies, to 1 million from 2 million. 

-Sued at least six states on grounds that they had too many people on 
their voter rolls. Some eligible voters were removed in the resulting 
purges. 

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. 

Later in 2005, career lawyers wrote a memo recommending that the 
department oppose a new Georgia law requiring voters to present a $20 
photo ID. They argued that the requirement would discriminate against 
poor blacks, but that was quickly rejected. 

Toby Moore, one of the five career lawyers who reviewed the memo, said 
the only dissenter to the recommendation was a new hire, Joshua Rogers, 
a member of the National Republican Lawyers Association, a partisan 
organization interested in election issues. 

Moore said that John Tanner, who'd just been appointed the new section 
chief, "doctored the memo ... reversing many of our findings," and used 
the occasion to change procedures so that he alone could make future 
recommendations. 

A Georgia state judge, acting on a suit by civil rights groups, struck 
down the law as unconstitutional. 

Moore, now the project manager for American University's Commission on 
Election Reform, said he believes that administration officials felt the 
Voting Rights Section was populated by "recalcitrant, embedded, liberal 
Democrats ... and they were determined to plant their DNA, change the 
institution and bring it to bear on behalf of Republican interests." 

Spakovsky, who declined to be interviewed, also played a role in an 
expansive interpretation of the new federal election law. 

The Help America Vote Act directed states to create central, 
computerized voter registration lists, to make a "reasonable effort" to 
remove ineligible names and to match new applicants' driver's licenses 
and Social Security numbers to those in state databases. 

A failure to match wasn't grounds for rejection: Tiny variations such as 
the inclusion of a middle name or misplaced figure could prevent a 
match. But when confused state officials asked the Justice Department 
about the requirement, Spakovsky offered a harsh reading of the law. 

In a letter on Sept. 8, 2003, he advised Judith Arnold, Maryland's 
counsel for election laws, that the application "must be denied" if an 
applicant's data failed to match that in driver's license and Social 
Security databases. He wrote that "the prudent course" would be to let 
those voters cast provisional ballots that would count only if their 
registration information were verified later. 

His guidance was posted on the Voting Rights Section's Web site. 

Some states, including California, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, 
Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington, began to reject applicants 
whose credentials didn't match. 

The rejections prompted a lawsuit and protests by civil rights groups, 
which halted the practice. 

The practice was "a barrier to voting," said Wendy Weiser, director of 
the Democracy Program at New York University's Brennan Center for 
Justice, whose suit in Washington state led to a court injunction. 

Catherine Blinn, Washington state's assistant elections director, said 
in a sworn statement last year that her state was merely following 
guidance from the Justice Department and cited Spakovsky's letter to 
Maryland. 

Just before the 2006 election, the California Secretary of State's 
Office rejected more than 20,000 registration applications, including 43 
percent of Los Angeles County's new applicants. Those rejections were 
reversed before Election Day amid a public clamor. 

Former Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, a moderate Republican, said 
in a phone interview that Justice Department officials reviewed his 
office's regulations and okayed the rejections, but gave no hint that 
they exceeded federal law. 

The Bush administration also has shifted enforcement priorities under 
the National Voter Registration Act, known as the "Motor Voter" law 
because it provides for registration at state vehicle licensing and 
public assistance agencies. 

In the last six years, the number of voters registered at state 
government agencies that provide services to the poor and disabled has 
been cut in half, to 1 million. 

Instead of forcing lax agencies to increase registrations, the Justice 
Department sued at least six states and sent threatening enforcement 
letters to others requiring them to scour their election rolls for 
potentially ineligible voters. 

Deputy Director Michael Slater of Project Vote, a national voter 
registration group, called this "selective enforcement. ... They've 
focused on purging of voters from registration rolls at the expense of 
enforcing provisions that encourage registration." 

He said that Kentucky eliminated 4,000 people from its list of voters, 
but "did it poorly, and took off people who lived there and tried to 
vote." 

One of the Justice Department suits was filed against Missouri's 
Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. Last week, U.S. District 
Judge Nanette Laughrey in Jefferson City, the capital, threw out the 
suit, noting that the motor voter law was intended to increase voter 
participation and eliminate fraud. 

The judge wrote that the Justice Department had offered no evidence that 
anyone had been denied his right to vote as a result of deficiencies in 
voter rolls, and "nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud 
has occurred." 

For more information on the Georgia litigation, as well as other major 
election law litigation: 
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/common-cause.php 
   
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/17102319.htm?sour
ce=rss&channel=krwashington_nation

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