Fix the Vote

I've long thought that the 2004 election was "fixed" (to say nothing of the 2000 race), see Can We Try Again?, but I thought that the goal was to ensure success in particular key races. Based upon Tom Delay's redistricting efforts in Texas that occurred several years ago, I should have realized that the GOP's mission would expand beyond a particular contest, to focus on a way to alter the outcome of elections generally. Much less effort for maximum result.

A few months ago, I noted the politicization of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, see A Long History, including the Division's new shift away from the protection of voting rights. However, as closely as I followed the story, I still did not realize the true extent of the abuse of power that actually occurred. The Attorneygate scandal reveals the depths to which the Bush Administration was willing to go to subvert the electoral process -- really democracy itself -- for it's own political purposes.

Via Phawker, are the latest revelations in the Attorneygate scandal, in which scope of the Administration's "vote suppression agenda" is discussed. The handiwork of Hans von Spakovsky, who worked first in DOJ and then in the Federal Election Commission, McClatchy writes, in Efforts to stop `voter fraud' may have curbed legitimate voting:

During four years as a Justice Department civil rights lawyer, Hans von Spakovsky went so far in a crusade against voter fraud as to warn of its dangers under a pseudonym in a law journal article.

Writing as 'Publius,' von Spakovsky contended that every voter should be required to produce a photo-identification card and that there was 'no evidence' that such restrictions burden minority voters disproportionately.

Now, amid a scandal over politicization of the Justice Department, Congress is beginning to examine allegations that von Spakovsky was a key player in a Republican campaign to hang onto power in Washington by suppressing the votes of minority voters.

'Mr. von Spakovsky was central to the administration's pursuit of strategies that had the effect of suppressing the minority vote,' charged Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief who worked under him.

See also, TPMmuckraker. The "anonymous" law review article, "Securing the Integrity of American Elections: The Need for Change" (only available through Lexus/Nexis), is a masterpiece. It's premise:

It is unfortunately true that in the great democracy in which we live, voter
fraud has had a long and studied role in our elections. Maintaining the security
of our voter registration and voting process, while at the same time protecting
the voting rights of individuals and guaranteeing their access to the polls,
must be our foremost objective. Unlike what certain advocates in the civil
rights community believe, these goals are not mutually exclusive. Every vote
that is stolen through fraud disenfranchises a voter who has cast a legitimate
ballot in the same way that an individual who is eligible to vote is
disenfranchised when he is kept out of a poll or is somehow otherwise prevented
from casting a ballot. In other words, violations of criminal election crimes
statutes are just as important as violations of federal voting rights statutes
and both cause equal damage to our democracy.

Of course, the law review article goes on to detail various instances of serious voter fraud -- all perpetrated by Democrats, of course, and argues passionately for the urgent need for voter ID laws to protect the integrity of the electoral process. Further, contrary to the view of the Civil Rights Division (where he was employed at the time), he argues that voter ID is the only way to save the integrity of the vote, with no adverse impact on minority voters. Interestingly, he makes a similar argument in a Federalist Society paper, "Increasing the Security of Elections: The Effect of Identification Requirements on Turnout of Minority Voters," citing the Publius law review without mentioning his authorship of that piece. And, but of course, it turns out that von Spakovsky was also involved in the Delay gerrymandering case, see The Mahablog.

The McClatchy article lists several focal areas that von Spakovsky concentrated during his DOJ tenure:

In interviews, current and former federal officials and civil rights leaders told McClatchy Newspapers that von Spakovsky:

-Sped approval of tougher voter ID laws in Georgia and Arizona in 2005, joining decisions to override career lawyers who believed that Georgia's law would restrict voting by poor blacks and who felt that more analysis was needed on the Arizona law's impact on Native Americans and Latinos.

-Tried to influence the federal Election Assistance Commission's research into the dimensions of voter fraud nationally and the impact of restrictive voter ID laws - research that could undermine a vote-suppression agenda.

-Allegedly engineered the ouster of the commission's chairman, Paul DeGregorio, whom von Spakovsky considered insufficiently partisan.

As the scandal conflagrates, there is yet more to pile on the pyre of fraud. Richard L. Hasen, writing about the DOJ issue for Slate, notes yet another aspect to the "voter fraud" fraud, in The incredible, disappearing American Center for Voting Rights. Noting the demise of the American Center for Voting Rights, a voter ID law proponent, Hasen says that this "think tank" was another part of the Republican strategy of raising voter fraud as a crisis in American elections:

Presidential adviser Karl Rove and his allies, who have been ghostbusting illusory dead and fictional voters since the contested 2000 election, apparently mounted a two-pronged attack. One part of that attack, at the heart of the current Justice Department scandals, involved getting the DoJ and various U.S. attorneys in battleground states to vigorously prosecute cases of voter fraud. That prong has failed. After exhaustive effort, the Department of Justice discovered virtually no polling-place voter fraud, and its efforts to fire the U.S. attorneys in battleground states who did not push the voter-fraud line enough has backfired.

But the second prong of this attack may have proven more successful. This involved using ACVR to give "think tank" academic cachet to the unproven idea that voter fraud is a major problem in elections. That cachet would be used to support the passage of onerous voter-identification laws that depress turnout among the poor, minorities, and the elderly—groups more likely to vote Democratic. Where the Bush administration may have failed to nail illegal voters, the effort to suppress minority voting has borne more fruit, as more states pass these laws, and courts begin to uphold them in the name of beating back waves of largely imaginary voter fraud.

Like the lie repeated often enough becomes the truth, Hasen fears that "even with the demise of ACVR, the hard work—of giving credibility to a nonproblem—is done." How true -- after all, how many people still believe Iraq was behind 9/11? These same people will still believe a voter fraud crisis exists years from now.

Tags: Politics, Law, Voting Rights, Civil Liberties, Attorneygate