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Broken Elections, Stolen Votes (cont.)

Welch did introduce as evidence some figures on multiple registrations. He said that 100,000 Floridians were registered simultaneously in either New York or New Jersey and that 60,000 Kentuckians were also registered across the border in Tennessee. But Welch did note that many such cases can be attributed to messy voter rolls rather than fraudulent behavior. Another witness, Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, referred to a University of Connecticut study that found 8,558 of Connecticut’s deceased on voter rolls; more than 300 were listed as having voted after they had died. Connecticut’s secretary of state announced in a press conference that no fraud had occurred, but that 5,000 names have been removed from the Connecticut rolls. Currently, Connecticut’s separate Elections Enforcement Commission is looking one-by-one into the cases in which votes were actually cast for any signs of voter fraud.

In his closing remarks at the hearing, Civil Rights Commissioner Michael Yaki, a Democrat, expressed concern about the November election because Obama is an African-American, and one historic motive for election fraud in the United States has been disenfranchisement of blacks.

“Of all elections in the history of this country,” he said, “if there’s any election for which the ’65 Voting Rights Act and its reauthorization cannot fail us in any way, shape, or form — is this election. If there is any doubt, if there is any issue of barriers to voting by African-Americans in this country in this election, this nation will have extreme difficulties dealing with that in its aftermath. . . . We’ve gotta get it right. Democratic, Republican, liberal, conservative, left, right, independent, whatever — we’ve got to get it right this time.”

There’s little wonder John Ashcroft was personally concerned about election fraud: He was named attorney general after being narrowly defeated for reelection to his Senate seat from Missouri by a dead man. Republicans cried fraud, saying it was improper for Democrats to obtain a court order keeping the polls in St. Louis open beyond their scheduled closing time, giving a victory to the late Mel Carnahan.

But Democrats came to see more than personal feelings at work. The Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative that Ashcroft launched in 2002 charged the 94 U.S. Attorneys’ Offices with vigorously pursuing voting fraud. Five years on, it came to light that Ashcroft’s successor as attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, had dismissed nine U.S. attorneys around the country — and as the scandal unfolded it became clear that several had drawn displeasure for their not responding aggressively enough.

In the fall of 2006, the U.S. attorney for New Mexico, David Iglesias, met Patrick Rogers for lunch at an Albuquerque restaurant. Rogers, a well-connected Republican lawyer, wanted to know why Iglesias was not aggressively pursuing cases of voter fraud. Iglesias said he told Rogers that after reviewing more than 100 complaints, none warranted criminal charges. Two years earlier, Iglesias had taken some heat from home-state Republicans for failing to prosecute a worker who allegedly filled out forms to register a 13-year-old to vote. Now — with midterm elections coming up, with the Republicans in danger of losing control of Congress, and with New Mexico increasingly looking like a swing state — Rogers made his unhappiness known.

He wasn’t the only one. New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, a powerful Republican, placed three calls to Gonzalez to complain about Iglesias. Also joining the chorus was Allen Weh, the New Mexico GOP chairman, who had previously complained about Iglesias to an aide to Karl Rove. Weh later buttonholed Rove himself at a White House holiday party in late 2006. “Is anything ever going to happen to that guy?” Weh said he asked Rove. “He’s gone,” Rove told Weh, according to an interview Weh later gave to McClatchy Newspapers.

And by December 7, he was. In Karl Rove’s April 2006 appearance before the Republican National Lawyers Association, when he made his remark about who can stuff the ballot box “the best and most,” he also listed 11 states that would play a pivotal role in the 2008 elections. In 2005 and 2006, the Bush administration replaced U.S. attorneys in nine of the states he listed: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Arkansas, and New Mexico. Some went quietly; some, like Iglesias, did not.

In August 2007 Gonzales himself would resign, amid accusations that he had misled Congress and allowed partisan politics to infiltrate the policies and daily operations of the Department of Justice.

Among those enforcing the party line was Bradley Schlozman, the deputy chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division in Washington. Schlozman made partisan loyalty a hiring priority and reassigned staffers he felt were not sympathetic, reportedly saying he wanted to “make room for some good Americans.” He urged federal suits to force states to purge their voter rolls.

In March, 2006, Schlozman — who had no prosecutorial experience — was named U.S. attorney of western Missouri to replace the top prosecutor, who had fallen into disfavor over the vote fraud prosecution issue. Less than a week before the 2006 election, ignoring Justice Department policy to refrain from filing voter fraud charges so close to an election, Schlozman announced felony indictments of four workers for a liberal activist group.

During Schlozman’s tenure in the Justice Department, many career lawyers left the civil rights division. One of them, Joseph D. Rich, who was chief of the division’s voting section from 1999 to 2005, wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed article last year that “the Bush administration has rewarded loyalty over all else.”

Another loyal Republican intent on ferreting out fraud was Hans von Spakovsky, the witness who told the Civil Rights Commission about the number of dead voters still on the rolls in Connecticut. Before arriving at the Justice Department, he had been a Georgia county election official who had fought for tougher voter identification laws in his home state. In his post at the voting rights unit, von Spakovsky approved the plan for redistricting Texas put forth in 2003 by former Representative Tom DeLay, despite the opinion of career lawyers that it discriminated against black and Latino voters. He also overruled staff recommendations and approved a voter identification law in Georgia. Both plans were later rejected by the federal courts.

In January 2006 von Spakovsky was given a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission, the bipartisan agency charged with enforcing the Federal Election Campaign Act. Later, when he went before the Senate seeking confirmation to a full six-year term amid the growing uproar in Congress over the politicization of the Justice Department, Justice Department lawyers who had worked for von Spakovsky accused him of blocking investigations of local governments suspected of suppressing the minority vote. They also accused him of attempting to influence the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s research into the extent of voter fraud nationally.

The commission was created in 2002 to serve as a national clearinghouse on election information and procedures. Among the commission’s duties was investigating voter fraud and intimidation. A preliminary report, prepared by a bipartisan team of researchers but never officially released, concluded that “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling-place fraud, or at least much less than is claimed.” But that language ultimately was watered down when the report finally was made public. The final version of the report came to this conclusion: “[T]here is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.”

The revisions to the report prompted an outcry from one of the co-authors, who said the changes “completely stood our own work on its head.” Tova Andrea Wang, the liberal-leaning member of the two-person team, claimed that von Spakovsky had complained about the findings. E-mails later released showed that von Spakovsky tried to persuade the commission that its research was flawed and biased.

A special investigator looked into the allegations and concluded this March that the commission had revised the report based upon legitimate concerns, and that von Spakovsky acted properly in his role as an adviser. Wang says she sees a positive result from this outcome: The commission, she told the Center, has become more transparent about its research projects.