Just five days before last November’s elections, this was the lead editorial from the Wall Street Journal:
So, less than a week before the midterm elections, four workers from Acorn, the liberal activist group that has registered millions of voters, have been indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms to the Kansas City, Missouri, election board. But hey, who needs voter ID laws?
We wish this were an aberration, but allegations of fraud have tainted Acorn voter drives across the country. Acorn workers have been convicted in Wisconsin and Colorado, and investigations are still under way in Ohio, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.
The good news for anyone who cares about voter integrity is that the Justice Department finally seems poised to connect these dots instead of dismissing such revelations as the work of a few yahoos. After the federal indictments were handed up in Kansas City this week, the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a statement that “This national investigation is very much ongoing.”
Acknowledging, of course, that the Wall Street Journal editorial page is an unreliable source on such matters, some reading that editorial might think there was a serious voter-fraud crisis. That, perhaps, liberal activists were literally trying to steal an election. After all, the Justice Department has a long-standing policy of avoiding election law prosecutions immediately before voters head to the polls, so for these indictments to come down with less than a week before the midterms, there had to be some serious wrongdoing. And if so, it made some sense for the right-wing WSJ editorial page to gloat about it. Fox News reporting from the time followed a similar course.
What we didn’t know at the time, however, was the truth. Bradley Schlozman — the former U.S. Attorney for Kansas City and controversial deputy head at the Civil Rights Division — appears to have rushed these ACORN indictments for maximum political benefit.
In the context of the prosecutor purge scandal, this one’s a gem.
Paul Kiel explains.
According to Elyshya Miller, ACORN’s head organizer for Kansas City, ACORN identified certain forms as potentially fraudulent and turned them over to prosecutors in late October; four organizers were responsible. A week later, all four organizers were indicted by a grand jury.
But in their evident haste to indict, the prosecutors made a mistake — they indicted the wrong person. Three weeks after the election, Schlozman’s office dropped the charges against one of the defendants, Stephanie Davis, admitting that her identity was used without her permission. It was not until January of this year that Schlozman’s office finally indicted one Caren Davis, who was apparently the person they were really after. Caren Davis’ lawyer Dana Altieri told me that Davis is currently undergoing a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether she is competent to stand trial.
But let’s look at the indicted crimes themselves. The four defendants were accused of forging the registration forms for a grand total of six voters (Caren Davis was responsible for three). In some cases, the defendants simply made people up; others forged the registrations for real people.
As The New York Times has noted, “the forms could likely never be used in voting.” Other U.S. attorneys had declined to pursue similar cases — in fact, despite Schlozman’s “national investigation,” these were the only charges filed against ACORN organizers nationwide in 2006.
Two of the fired U.S. attorneys provide an answer why.
The former U.S. Attorney for Little Rock Bud Cummins told Salon that in cases like this, the fraud is perpetrated upon ACORN, not by them. The organizers forge registrations in order to justify their $8.00/hour wages. Elyshya Miller, the organizer from ACORN, explained to me that the group frequently hires people who are in “desperate situations,” who “really need something at the time.”
Schlozman’s cases, the Times reported, were “similar to one that [former U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David] Iglesias had declined to prosecute, saying he saw no intent to influence the outcome of an election.”
Two quick questions. One, who at the Justice Department signed off on Schlozman’s ridiculous indictments?
And two, how soon do you suppose we’ll get a correction from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board?