Friday, April 27, 2007
Editorial: The voter fraud scam
Where Republican operatives see conspiracies to rig elections, researchers do not.
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
The Bush Justice Department has something of an obsession with voter fraud. At least two of the federal prosecutors it booted out of office last year had not pursued such cases vigorously enough to satisfy Republican politicians or party officials.
The bigger fraud, though, is an Election Assistance Commission report last year indicating GOP assumptions about pervasive voter fraud are debatable when, in fact, researchers found little evidence of it across the country.
Last April, White House political operative Karl Rove went so far as to assert in a speech to Republican lawyers: "We're, in some parts of the country, I'm afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses."
Yet, The New York Times reports, a five-year, nationwide crackdown on this alleged danger to the republic netted only about 120 charges and 86 convictions as of last year.
Rather than broad conspiracies to subvert the will of the people, the research found mainly individual violations of election laws that previous Justice Departments would not have prosecuted. Often, the violations were the result of mistakes.
The newspaper cites the example of a onetime jewelry store owner in Tallahassee, Fla., a Pakistani living legally in the U.S. for more than 10 years, who filled out a voter registration form at the behest of a clerk at the division of motor vehicles. He didn't know he had to be a U.S. citizen.
Now he and his wife and daughter, both U.S. citizens, are living in Lahore, Pakistan.
In a few states, The Times reported, U.S. attorney's offices "did turn up instances of fraudulent voting in mostly rural areas. They were in the hard-to-extinguish tradition of vote buying, where local politicians offered $5 to $100 for individuals' support."
Or beer, or cigarettes, or pork rinds, the price for votes three years ago in Appalachia's town elections in far Southwest Virginia.
Rove should be relieved that the conspirators were convicted. None, as far as we know, wore mirrored sunglasses.
