Yesterday we learned that a panel of government experts prepared a detailed report examining instances of voter fraud in the U.S. and found, not surprisingly, that there is no systemic national problem. Bush administration officials didn’t care for those results — so they changed the report.
Today, the NYT takes this one step further, documenting the Bush gang’s crackdown on fraud, highlighting just how little they found.
Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.
Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.
Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.
Maybe 86 fraud convictions sounds like a lot. It isn’t. After the White House placed voter fraud at the top of its priority list, and Justice Department changed its guidelines on prosecuting the issue, the administration sought to root out this scourge of our democracy from coast to coast. Over the course of four years, they managed to find a mere 86 cases — none of which attempted to change the results of an election, and most of which were genuine mistakes.
Let’s not lose sight of the significance of this — the White House and its Republican allies have been actively trying to disenfranchise Americans by incessant whining about a problem that doesn’t exist.
Consider the case of Kimberly Prude, a grandmother caught up in this stupidity.
Ms. Prude’s path to jail began after she attended a Democratic rally in Milwaukee featuring the Rev. Al Sharpton in late 2004. Along with hundreds of others, she marched to City Hall and registered to vote. Soon after, she sent in an absentee ballot.
Four years earlier, though, Ms. Prude had been convicted of trying to cash a counterfeit county government check worth $1,254. She was placed on six years’ probation.
Ms. Prude said she believed that she was permitted to vote because she was not in jail or on parole, she testified in court. Told by her probation officer that she could not vote, she said she immediately called City Hall to rescind her vote, a step she was told was not necessary.
“I made a big mistake, like I said, and I truly apologize for it,” Ms. Prude said during her trial in 2005. That vote, though, resulted in a felony conviction and sent her to jail for violating probation.
“I find this whole prosecution mysterious,” Judge Diane P. Wood of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, said at a hearing in Ms. Prude’s case. “I don’t know whether the Eastern District of Wisconsin goes after every felon who accidentally votes. It is not like she voted five times. She cast one vote.”
Prude is one of the 86. The others are similar.
No one should be fooled by the administration’s fascination with the integrity of the democratic process. The Bush gang figured out, shortly after taking office in 2001, that there are two keys to helping elect Republicans — play to the base and prevent (likely) Dems from voting. On the latter, that meant aggressively targeting minorities and low-income families, making it harder for them to participate in elections. The results included new restrictive laws and crackdowns on people like Kimberly Prude.
This is, in a way, the Bush gang’s attempt to cheat. Worried that they may lose elections in a straight-up fair fight, they came up with a scheme to keep “certain” people away from the ballot box.
And all of this, of course, ties into the purge scandal.
Only most of the relatively non-partisan and professional US Attorneys simply didn’t find any actual fraud. Choosing not to indict people on bogus charges got at least two of the US Attorneys (Iglesias and McKay) fired. And we are seeing evidence that others may have been nudged out less directly for the same reasons. In turn they’ve been replaced by a new crop of highly-political party operative prosecutors who, in the gentle wording of the Times, “may not be so reticent” about issuing indictments against people who have committed technical voting infractions with no intent to cast a fraudulent ballot. Along the way, the fever to find someone, anyone guilty of committing even a technical infraction has landed folks like Ms. Prude in the slammer. They are what you might call the prosecutorial road kill in the Rove Republican party’s effort to ride roughshod over American citizens’ voting rights to entrench the GOP as the country’s permanent electoral majority.
Who’s running all this? Who’s put it all in motion. Look at the documents that have already been released. It’s been run out of Karl Rove’s office at the White House.
With each passing day, it appears more and more that the White House is home to a large criminal operation.