P
Pookie
Guest
Whose Ox Is Gored
After Bush's victory, liberals shouted "Voter fraud!" Why have they changed
their tune?
Monday, July 30, 2007 12:01 a.m.
When Republicans win elections, liberals are quick to cry fraud. But when
actual fraud is found, they are just as quick to deny it, if Democrats are
the ones who benefit.
Just before the 2004 election, the influential blog DailyKos.com warned of a
"nationwide" wave of voter fraud against John Kerry. After the election,
liberal blogger Josh Marshall urged Mr. Kerry not to concede because the
election had been "too marred with voter suppression, dirty tricks and other
unspeakable antics not to press every last possibility" of changing the
outcome. When Congress met in January 2005 to certify the election results,
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D., Ohio)
challenged Mr. Bush's victory and forced Congress to debate the issue.
Months later, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean maintained
that blacks had been the victims of "massive voter suppression" in Ohio.
But now liberals are accusing the Bush Justice Department of cooking up
spurious claims of voter fraud in the 2006 elections and creating what the
New York Times calls a "fantasy" that voter fraud is a problem. Last week
Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, claimed that the
administration fired eight U.S. attorneys last year in order to pressure
prosecutors "to bring cases of voter fraud to try to influence elections."
He said one replacement U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., was a "partisan
operative" sent "to file charges on the eve of an election in violation of
Justice Department guidelines." But the Kansas City prosecution was approved
by career Justice lawyers, and the guidelines in question have since been
rewritten by career lawyers in the Public Integrity section of Justice.
But last week also brought fresh evidence that voter fraud is a real problem
and could even branch out into cyberspace:
.. California's Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a Democrat, reported that
state-approved hackers had been "able to bypass physical and software
security in every [voting] machine they tested," although she admitted that
the hackers had access to internal security information and source codes
that vote thieves wouldn't normally have.
.. The Florida secretary of state's office reported it had found "legally
sufficient" evidence that some 60 people in Palm Beach County had committed
voter fraud by voting both there and in New York state. The Florida
Department of Law Enforcement has launched a formal probe. In 2004, New
York's Daily News found that 46,000 people were illegally registered to vote
in both New York and Florida.
.. Prosecutors in Hoboken, N.J., last week announced they are investigating a
vagrant who was part of a group of voters observed to be acting suspiciously
outside a polling place in an election last month. After he signed a voting
register in the name of another man, he was confronted by a campaign worker
and fled the scene. He later admitted to cops that he had been paid $10 to
vote.
.. Last week the U.S. Department of Justice recommended that an outside party
be appointed to oversee Democratic primary elections in Noxubee County,
Miss. In June, federal district judge Tom Lee found that Ike Brown, the
Democratic political boss of Noxubee, had paid notaries public to visit
voters and illegally mark their absentee ballots, imported illegal
candidates to run for county office and manipulated the registration rolls.
But the most interesting news came out of Seattle, where on Thursday local
prosecutors indicted seven workers for Acorn, a union-backed activist group
that last year registered more than 540,000 low-income and minority voters
nationwide and deployed more than 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers. The Acorn
defendants stand accused of submitting phony forms in what Secretary of
State Sam Reed says is the "worst case of voter-registration fraud in the
history" of the state.
The list of "voters" registered in Washington state included former House
Speaker Dennis Hastert, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Tom
Friedman, actress Katie Holmes and nonexistent people with nonsensical names
such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses used for the fake names
were local homeless shelters. Given that the state doesn't require the
showing of any identification before voting, it is entirely possible people
could have illegally voted using those names.
Local officials refused to accept the registrations because they had been
delivered after last year's Oct. 7 registration deadline. Initially, Acorn
officials demanded the registrations be accepted and threatened to sue King
County (Seattle) officials if they were tossed out. But just after four
Acorn registration workers were indicted in Kansas City, Mo., on similar
charges of fraud, the group reversed its position and said the registrations
should be rejected. But by then, local election workers had had a reason to
carefully scrutinize the forms and uncovered the fraud. Of the 1,805 names
submitted by Acorn, only nine have been confirmed as valid, and another 34
are still being investigated. The rest--over 97%--were fake.
In Kansas City, where two Acorn workers have pleaded guilty to committing
registration fraud last year while two others await trial, only 40% of the
35,000 registrations submitted by the group turned out to be bogus. But
Melody Powell, chairman of the Kansas City Board of Elections, says Acorn's
claim that it brought the fraud in her city to light is "seriously
misleading." She says her staff first took the evidence to the FBI, and only
then Acorn helped identify the perpetrators. "It's a potential recipe for
fraud," she says, noting that "anyone can find a voter card mailed to a
false apartment building address lying around a lobby and use it to vote."
Ms. Powell also worries that legitimate voters who were registered a second
time by someone else under a false address might find it difficult to vote.
In Washington state, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said that in lieu
of charging Acorn itself as part of the registration fraud case, he had
worked out an agreement by which the group will pay $25,000 to reimburse the
costs of the investigation and formally agree to tighten supervision of its
activities, which Mr. Satterberg said were rife with "lax oversight."
Last year several Acorn employees told me that the Acorn scandals that have
cropped up around the country are no accident. "There's no quality control
on purpose, no checks and balances," says Nate Toler, who was head of an
Acorn campaign against Wal-Mart in California until late last year, when
Acorn fired him for speaking to me.
Loretta Barton, another former community organizer for Acorn, told me that
"all Acorn wanted from registration drives was results." Ironically, given
Acorn's strong backing from unions, Ms. Barton alleges that when she and her
co-workers asked about forming a union, they were slapped down: "We were
told if you get a union, you won't have a job." There is some history here:
In 2003, the National Labor Relations Board ordered Acorn to rehire and pay
restitution to three employees it had illegally fired for trying to organize
a union.
Acorn president John James told reporters last week that his group will
cooperate with election officials to make sure "no one is trying to pull a
fast one on us." "We are looking to the future," he said in a statement.
"Voter participation is a vital part of our work to increase civic
participation."
But the Acorn case points up just how difficult it is to convince
prosecutors to bring voter fraud cases. Donald Washington, a former U.S.
attorney for northern Louisiana, admits that "most of the time, we can't do
much of anything [about fraud] until the election is over. And the closer we
get to the election, the less willing we are to get involved because of just
the appearance of impropriety, just the appearance of the federal government
somehow shading how this election ought to occur." Several prosecutors told
me they feared charges of racism or of a return to Jim Crow voter
suppression tactics if they pursued touchy voter fraud cases--as indeed is
now happening as part of the reaction to the U.S. attorney firings.
Take Washington state, where former U.S. attorney John McKay declined to
pursue allegations of voter fraud after that state's hotly contested 2004
governor's race was decided in favor of Democrat Christine Gregoire by 133
votes on a third recount. As the Seattle media widely reported, some
"voters" were deceased, others were registered in storage lockers, and still
others were ineligible felons. Extra ballots were "found" and declared valid
10 times during the vote count and recount. In some precincts, more votes
were cast than voters showed up at the polls.
Mr. McKay insists he left "no stone unturned" in investigating allegations
of fraud in the governor's race but found no evidence of a crime. But in an
interview with Stefan Sharkansky of SoundPolitics.com in May, Mr. McKay
admitted that he "didn't like the way the election was handled" and that it
had "smelled really, really bad." His decision not to prosecute was
apparently based on the threshold of evidence he insisted be met before he
would even deploy FBI agents to investigate: a firsthand account of a
conspiracy to alter the outcome of the election.
But Mr. McKay is incorrect in saying that he had to find a conspiracy in
order to reach the federal threshold for election crimes. In Milwaukee,
after the 2004 election U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic investigated many of
the same problems that were found in Seattle: felons voting, double-voting
and more votes cast than voters who signed poll books. In 2005 Mr. Biskupic
concluded that he had found nothing that "has shown a plot to try to tip an
election," but he nonetheless prosecuted and won six convictions for felon
voting and double-voting.
Tom McCabe, executive vice president of the Building Industry Association in
Washington state, says he is pleased that the evidence his group compiled
was helpful in securing the indictments of the seven Acorn workers last
week. But he can't help but wonder if the Acorn workers who forged
registrations last year were part of the cadre of election workers who were
allowed by a local judge after the 2004 governor's election to seek out
voters who had given problematic signatures on their voter-registration
cards and helped them "revise" their registrations in order to make their
votes valid. "We may never know whether Acorn workers forged signatures in
2004, but we know they did in 2006," he says. "Those who think voter fraud
isn't an ongoing problem should come to Washington state."
Instead, Sen. Leahy and other liberals are busy dismissing concerns about
voter fraud, no doubt in an effort to make certain the Justice Department
drops the issue as a priority before the 2008 election. But the blunders and
politicization of parts of the Bush Justice Department notwithstanding,
voter fraud deserves to be investigated and prosecuted. The Justice
Department may be dysfunctional and poorly led, but the Democratic Congress
seems more interested in paralyzing its activities than helping to fix the
problem.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110010400
After Bush's victory, liberals shouted "Voter fraud!" Why have they changed
their tune?
Monday, July 30, 2007 12:01 a.m.
When Republicans win elections, liberals are quick to cry fraud. But when
actual fraud is found, they are just as quick to deny it, if Democrats are
the ones who benefit.
Just before the 2004 election, the influential blog DailyKos.com warned of a
"nationwide" wave of voter fraud against John Kerry. After the election,
liberal blogger Josh Marshall urged Mr. Kerry not to concede because the
election had been "too marred with voter suppression, dirty tricks and other
unspeakable antics not to press every last possibility" of changing the
outcome. When Congress met in January 2005 to certify the election results,
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D., Ohio)
challenged Mr. Bush's victory and forced Congress to debate the issue.
Months later, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean maintained
that blacks had been the victims of "massive voter suppression" in Ohio.
But now liberals are accusing the Bush Justice Department of cooking up
spurious claims of voter fraud in the 2006 elections and creating what the
New York Times calls a "fantasy" that voter fraud is a problem. Last week
Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, claimed that the
administration fired eight U.S. attorneys last year in order to pressure
prosecutors "to bring cases of voter fraud to try to influence elections."
He said one replacement U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., was a "partisan
operative" sent "to file charges on the eve of an election in violation of
Justice Department guidelines." But the Kansas City prosecution was approved
by career Justice lawyers, and the guidelines in question have since been
rewritten by career lawyers in the Public Integrity section of Justice.
But last week also brought fresh evidence that voter fraud is a real problem
and could even branch out into cyberspace:
.. California's Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a Democrat, reported that
state-approved hackers had been "able to bypass physical and software
security in every [voting] machine they tested," although she admitted that
the hackers had access to internal security information and source codes
that vote thieves wouldn't normally have.
.. The Florida secretary of state's office reported it had found "legally
sufficient" evidence that some 60 people in Palm Beach County had committed
voter fraud by voting both there and in New York state. The Florida
Department of Law Enforcement has launched a formal probe. In 2004, New
York's Daily News found that 46,000 people were illegally registered to vote
in both New York and Florida.
.. Prosecutors in Hoboken, N.J., last week announced they are investigating a
vagrant who was part of a group of voters observed to be acting suspiciously
outside a polling place in an election last month. After he signed a voting
register in the name of another man, he was confronted by a campaign worker
and fled the scene. He later admitted to cops that he had been paid $10 to
vote.
.. Last week the U.S. Department of Justice recommended that an outside party
be appointed to oversee Democratic primary elections in Noxubee County,
Miss. In June, federal district judge Tom Lee found that Ike Brown, the
Democratic political boss of Noxubee, had paid notaries public to visit
voters and illegally mark their absentee ballots, imported illegal
candidates to run for county office and manipulated the registration rolls.
But the most interesting news came out of Seattle, where on Thursday local
prosecutors indicted seven workers for Acorn, a union-backed activist group
that last year registered more than 540,000 low-income and minority voters
nationwide and deployed more than 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers. The Acorn
defendants stand accused of submitting phony forms in what Secretary of
State Sam Reed says is the "worst case of voter-registration fraud in the
history" of the state.
The list of "voters" registered in Washington state included former House
Speaker Dennis Hastert, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Tom
Friedman, actress Katie Holmes and nonexistent people with nonsensical names
such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses used for the fake names
were local homeless shelters. Given that the state doesn't require the
showing of any identification before voting, it is entirely possible people
could have illegally voted using those names.
Local officials refused to accept the registrations because they had been
delivered after last year's Oct. 7 registration deadline. Initially, Acorn
officials demanded the registrations be accepted and threatened to sue King
County (Seattle) officials if they were tossed out. But just after four
Acorn registration workers were indicted in Kansas City, Mo., on similar
charges of fraud, the group reversed its position and said the registrations
should be rejected. But by then, local election workers had had a reason to
carefully scrutinize the forms and uncovered the fraud. Of the 1,805 names
submitted by Acorn, only nine have been confirmed as valid, and another 34
are still being investigated. The rest--over 97%--were fake.
In Kansas City, where two Acorn workers have pleaded guilty to committing
registration fraud last year while two others await trial, only 40% of the
35,000 registrations submitted by the group turned out to be bogus. But
Melody Powell, chairman of the Kansas City Board of Elections, says Acorn's
claim that it brought the fraud in her city to light is "seriously
misleading." She says her staff first took the evidence to the FBI, and only
then Acorn helped identify the perpetrators. "It's a potential recipe for
fraud," she says, noting that "anyone can find a voter card mailed to a
false apartment building address lying around a lobby and use it to vote."
Ms. Powell also worries that legitimate voters who were registered a second
time by someone else under a false address might find it difficult to vote.
In Washington state, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said that in lieu
of charging Acorn itself as part of the registration fraud case, he had
worked out an agreement by which the group will pay $25,000 to reimburse the
costs of the investigation and formally agree to tighten supervision of its
activities, which Mr. Satterberg said were rife with "lax oversight."
Last year several Acorn employees told me that the Acorn scandals that have
cropped up around the country are no accident. "There's no quality control
on purpose, no checks and balances," says Nate Toler, who was head of an
Acorn campaign against Wal-Mart in California until late last year, when
Acorn fired him for speaking to me.
Loretta Barton, another former community organizer for Acorn, told me that
"all Acorn wanted from registration drives was results." Ironically, given
Acorn's strong backing from unions, Ms. Barton alleges that when she and her
co-workers asked about forming a union, they were slapped down: "We were
told if you get a union, you won't have a job." There is some history here:
In 2003, the National Labor Relations Board ordered Acorn to rehire and pay
restitution to three employees it had illegally fired for trying to organize
a union.
Acorn president John James told reporters last week that his group will
cooperate with election officials to make sure "no one is trying to pull a
fast one on us." "We are looking to the future," he said in a statement.
"Voter participation is a vital part of our work to increase civic
participation."
But the Acorn case points up just how difficult it is to convince
prosecutors to bring voter fraud cases. Donald Washington, a former U.S.
attorney for northern Louisiana, admits that "most of the time, we can't do
much of anything [about fraud] until the election is over. And the closer we
get to the election, the less willing we are to get involved because of just
the appearance of impropriety, just the appearance of the federal government
somehow shading how this election ought to occur." Several prosecutors told
me they feared charges of racism or of a return to Jim Crow voter
suppression tactics if they pursued touchy voter fraud cases--as indeed is
now happening as part of the reaction to the U.S. attorney firings.
Take Washington state, where former U.S. attorney John McKay declined to
pursue allegations of voter fraud after that state's hotly contested 2004
governor's race was decided in favor of Democrat Christine Gregoire by 133
votes on a third recount. As the Seattle media widely reported, some
"voters" were deceased, others were registered in storage lockers, and still
others were ineligible felons. Extra ballots were "found" and declared valid
10 times during the vote count and recount. In some precincts, more votes
were cast than voters showed up at the polls.
Mr. McKay insists he left "no stone unturned" in investigating allegations
of fraud in the governor's race but found no evidence of a crime. But in an
interview with Stefan Sharkansky of SoundPolitics.com in May, Mr. McKay
admitted that he "didn't like the way the election was handled" and that it
had "smelled really, really bad." His decision not to prosecute was
apparently based on the threshold of evidence he insisted be met before he
would even deploy FBI agents to investigate: a firsthand account of a
conspiracy to alter the outcome of the election.
But Mr. McKay is incorrect in saying that he had to find a conspiracy in
order to reach the federal threshold for election crimes. In Milwaukee,
after the 2004 election U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic investigated many of
the same problems that were found in Seattle: felons voting, double-voting
and more votes cast than voters who signed poll books. In 2005 Mr. Biskupic
concluded that he had found nothing that "has shown a plot to try to tip an
election," but he nonetheless prosecuted and won six convictions for felon
voting and double-voting.
Tom McCabe, executive vice president of the Building Industry Association in
Washington state, says he is pleased that the evidence his group compiled
was helpful in securing the indictments of the seven Acorn workers last
week. But he can't help but wonder if the Acorn workers who forged
registrations last year were part of the cadre of election workers who were
allowed by a local judge after the 2004 governor's election to seek out
voters who had given problematic signatures on their voter-registration
cards and helped them "revise" their registrations in order to make their
votes valid. "We may never know whether Acorn workers forged signatures in
2004, but we know they did in 2006," he says. "Those who think voter fraud
isn't an ongoing problem should come to Washington state."
Instead, Sen. Leahy and other liberals are busy dismissing concerns about
voter fraud, no doubt in an effort to make certain the Justice Department
drops the issue as a priority before the 2008 election. But the blunders and
politicization of parts of the Bush Justice Department notwithstanding,
voter fraud deserves to be investigated and prosecuted. The Justice
Department may be dysfunctional and poorly led, but the Democratic Congress
seems more interested in paralyzing its activities than helping to fix the
problem.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110010400
