K
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
Guest
The Republican War on Voting
By Art Levine, The American Prospect
Posted on April 4, 2008, Printed on April 4, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/81016/
One week before the close of voter registration in Kentucky last fall,
in an election that culminated with the victory of Democratic
gubernatorial candidate Steve Beshear, Johanna Sharrard, a fresh-faced
26-year-old national organizer for the low-income advocacy group
ACORN, gathered her canvassers in a run-down Louisville office and
told them some good news: "We got 396 people yesterday -- that's
really great!" Then she added what could have seemed a jarringly
discordant note: "We know it's getting harder to reach people with the
cards in this area. It's really important that you guys are not
slipping up and turning to filling out your own applications or other
fraudulent activity. Just yesterday we had to let another person go
because she did not follow protocols." Sharrard continued sternly,
"What's important is that we get 15,000 new voters. We're not out
there to get 10,000 new voters and 5,000 false applications."
Indeed, the voter registration waged by ACORN (the Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now) in Kentucky was also an effort
to test the group's new system for rooting out any fraud. The
organization is readying itself for the challenges to voter
participation that the poor and minorities -- and Democrats -- are
sure to face in 2008.
Sharrard's cautionary tone was a response to the Republican Party's
ongoing nationwide campaign to suppress the low-income minority vote
by propagating the myth of voter fraud. Using various tactics --
including media smears, bogus lawsuits, restrictive new voting laws
and policies, and flimsy prosecutions -- Republican operatives,
election officials, and the GOP-controlled Justice Department have
limited voting access and gone after voter-registration groups such as
ACORN. Which should come as no surprise: In building support for
initiatives raising the minimum wage and kindred ballot measures,
ACORN has registered, in partnership with Project Vote, 1.6 million
largely Democratic-leaning voters since 2004. All told, non-profit
groups registered over three million new voters in 2004, about the
same time that Republican and Justice Department efforts to publicize
voter fraud and limit voting access became more widespread. And
attacking ACORN has been a central element of a systematic GOP
disenfranchisement agenda to undermine Democratic prospects before
each Election Day.
Revelations that U.S. attorneys were fired for their failure to
successfully prosecute voter fraud have revealed how fictitious the
allegations of widespread fraud actually were -- but the allegations
haven't gone away. They live on in all the vote-suppressing laws and
regulations that will likely affect this year's election, in GOP
rhetoric and, most recently, in the arguments presented by champions
of Indiana's restrictive voter-identification law in a case currently
before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, progressives have tended to pay more attention to
Election Day dirty tricks and to electronic voting machines than to a
more systemic threat: the Republican campaign to suppress the votes of
low-income, young, and minority voters through restrictive legislation
and rulings, all based on the mythic specter of voter fraud. Those
relatively transient voters, drawn to the polls this year by the Obama
and Clinton campaigns, could find themselves thwarted in November and
thereafter by the GOP-driven regime of voting restrictions --
particularly if, as many observers believe, the Court upholds
Indiana's restrictive law before it adjourns this June.
Voter fraud is actually less likely to occur than lightning striking a
person, according to data compiled by New York University's Brennan
Center for Justice. As Lorraine Minnite, a Columbia University
professor, observed in the Project Vote report, The Politics of Voter
Fraud, "The claim that voter fraud threatens the integrity of American
elections is itself a fraud." In October 2002, then-Attorney General
John Ashcroft launched an intensive "Ballot Access and Voting
Integrity Initiative" that required all U.S. attorney offices to
coordinate with local officials in combating voter fraud. Yet even
after the Justice Department declared the war against voter fraud a
"high priority," only 24 people were convicted of illegal voting in
federal elections between 2002 and 2005 -- and nobody was even charged
by Justice with impersonating another voter. (The Justice Department
declined to answer questions about more recent fraud prosecutions.)
And despite the anti-immigrant frenzy fueling photo-ID laws, only 14
noncitizens were convicted of illegally voting in federal elections
from 2002 through 2005 -- mostly because of their ignorance of
election law.
Unfortunately, the public hasn't heard just how nonexistent the voter
fraud epidemic actually is. While progressives have successfully
challenged some of the most restrictive laws in court, they're still
playing catch-up when it comes to combating the glib sound bites of
voter-fraud alarmists. Republicans and the Bush Justice Department
have cloaked their schemes under such noble-sounding concepts as
"ballot integrity." The GOP's vote-suppression playbook features
everything from phony lawsuits to questionable investigations to
authoritative-seeming reports, all with the aim of promoting
restrictive laws. These tactics were first perfected in the hotly
contested swing state of Missouri.
The roots of John Ashcroft's passion on this issue go back to the
chaos of Election Day 2000 in St. Louis, when hundreds, if not
thousands, of mostly inner-city voters were turned away from polling
places because their names were not on voting rolls. The resulting
last-minute court battle kept some polling places open for 45 minutes
after their scheduled closing time of 7 P.M. Ashcroft, then the
Republican U.S. Senate nominee, lost his race to the dead Democratic
governor, Mel Carnahan, whose name stayed on the ballot weeks after he
died in a plane crash. At an election-night party, an infuriated
Republican Sen. Kit Bond pounded the podium and screamed, "This is an
outrage!" -- and subsequently charged that Republican losses were due
in part to dogs and dead people voting. As one local government
official observed, "In St. Louis, 'dogs and dead people' is code for
black people [voting fraudulently]."
That election night gave birth to the new right-wing voter-fraud
movement, while Missouri became a proving ground for the vote-
suppression campaigns that later spread to other key states.
Missouri's then-Secretary of State Matt Blunt, now governor, launched
a trumped-up investigation that concluded that more than 1,000
fraudulent ballots had been cast in an organized scheme. A Justice
Department Civil Rights Division investigation, started before
Ashcroft shifted the department's priorities, found no fraudulent
ballots, however. Instead, it discovered that the St. Louis election
board had improperly purged 50,000 voters from the rolls.
Nonetheless, the template for smear campaigns, groundless lawsuits,
and politicized prosecutions used across the country had been set in
Missouri. Key roles were played by many of the same GOP zealots who
later made their mark on the national drive to fight voter fraud,
among them St. Louis attorney Thor Hearne, the 2004 Bush-Cheney
campaign election counsel who later launched the GOP front group, the
American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). And as early as 2002, the
executive director of the Missouri Republican Party pioneered a new
dirty trick: publicly "filing" with the Federal Election Commission a
26-page complaint against the state's leading registration group,
known as Pro Vote, that charged it with secretly conspiring with
Democrats in the Senate race -- but then failing to sign the document
so the agency never considered it.
The goal of such complaints and allegations was to create a barrage of
negative publicity about voter-registration groups and the voter-fraud
menace that could pave the way for restrictive laws. In Missouri, the
Republicans' cries for a new state photo-ID law began in 2002, before
the GOP blitz in most other states. The legislature passed such a bill
in early 2006, before it was struck down that September by a Missouri
state court as unconstitutional.
The GOP in Missouri also turned to prosecutions and lawsuits, most
either overblown or groundless. In November 2005, Bradley Schlozman,
then the Justice Department's acting civil-rights chief, insisted on
filing a lawsuit that accused Missouri's secretary of state, Robin
Carnahan, a Democrat, of failing to purge supposedly ineligible voters
under federal law. (U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was forced out in March
2006 for having balked at filing the suit.) A federal judge, who found
that the Justice Department did not produce any evidence showing fraud
justifying the purges, dismissed the lawsuit in April 2007. The
department continues to appeal the ruling.
The fraud-obsessed Schlozman was then moved into Graves' old post
without Senate confirmation, through a loophole in the Patriot Act. In
an apparent effort to discredit both Democrats and ACORN, just five
days before the tight Senate election in 2006 between incumbent
Republican Jim Talent and Democrat Claire McCaskill, Schlozman
announced, in violation of the department's own standards, the
indictment of four former ACORN workers who had been fired by ACORN
for filling out false voter-registration forms. The indictments were
part of a broader effort to tilt the campaign against Democrats by
bashing ACORN and limiting voter access. St. Louis' Republican
election director, Scott Leiendecker, sent out a chilling letter
shortly before the election to 5,000 mostly African-Americans
registered by ACORN, asking them to verify to the election board that
they were eligible to vote. Leiendecker backed off after he faced the
threat of a voting-rights lawsuit and received a warning letter from
Secretary of State Carnahan.
What began in Missouri soon went nationwide. Starting in 2003, the
Justice Department's civil-rights division issued a flurry of advisory
letters, rulings, and lawsuits under the guise of fighting fraud that
appear designed to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.
Federal and state courts have struck down some of the laws shaped by
policies promoted by the Justice Department, such as strict database-
matching laws limiting new voters in Washington state and Florida.
Even so, Justice Department-backed secretive purging policies have
targeted voter-registration applicants and current voters in several
key states: In Ohio in 2006, 303,000 voters were purged in three major
urban counties, while the Brennan Center reported that Pennsylvania's
rigid database rules, later loosened, had excluded up to 30 percent of
eligible registrants. Karl Rove aide Tim Griffin played a major role
in state GOP voter "caging" operations (that is, challenging the
eligibility of registered voters) in such states as Ohio and Florida.
These schemes, Project Vote reports, challenged the right of 77,000
mostly minority voters to cast ballots between 2004 and 2006, under
the pretext that non-forwardable letters sent by GOP activists to
their addresses were returned as undelivered. Thor Hearne's now-
vanished ACVR lobbied for strict voter-ID laws in nine states,
according to McClatchy and other news organizations. Voter-ID laws in
states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Indiana have, for now, been
allowed to stand. All these campaigns have created a kind of GOP vote-
suppression playbook that aims to limit voting rights in the states
and attack registration groups such as ACORN. In most states where
ACORN wages ballot-initiative and voter-registration campaigns,
Republican lawyers, officials, and some prosecutors routinely file
dubious lawsuits and complaints to generate bad press for the voter-
registration drives. The lawsuits seldom if ever succeed, but the bad
press they engender creates a climate to pass restrictive voting laws.
In New Mexico by the summer of 2004, ACORN's effort to register voters
in advance of the closely fought presidential election was a stunning
success: The organization registered 35,000 voters, mostly in the
Albuquerque area. "Republicans were freaking out," recalls John Boyd,
an attorney for the state Democratic Party. Republicans accused ACORN
of "manufacturing voters," conflating error-plagued cards with fraud
while trumpeting one registration card filled out in the name of a 13-
year-old boy. The boy's card became the centerpiece of the lawsuit
Rep. Joe Thompson, an Albuquerque Republican, filed in August 2004
demanding that the state government require photo ID for voters
registered by ACORN and other nonprofits. The lawsuit claimed that the
Republican plaintiffs' votes were "diluted" by supposedly false
registrations.
Their case fell apart in court, and by September, a judge dismissed
the lawsuit. But Republicans were not deterred by their loss in civil
court and pressed for a criminal investigation, a probe which U.S.
Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias started on the same day that
the court ruled against the GOP. Iglesias was a true believer in the
menace of voter fraud. As one of just two U.S. attorneys in the nation
to form such task forces, he was invited to lecture other U.S.
attorneys in 2005 as part of the annual Justice Department ballot-
integrity conference.
Iglesias' efforts weren't enough for Patrick Rogers, the Republican
National Lawyers Association point person in the state, who mounted a
campaign to pressure Iglesias to bring criminal charges before the
election, rather than form a task force. Indeed, even before Iglesias
concluded in 2006 that there wasn't enough evidence to indict on voter
fraud, major Republicans in the state had started asking the Bush
administration for his removal. In early December 2006, Iglesias was
one of seven U.S. attorneys whom the Justice Department fired.
Today, Iglesias says of voter fraud: "It's like the boogeymen parents
use to scare their children. It's very frightening, and it doesn't
exist. U.S. attorneys have better things to do with their time than
chasing voter-fraud phantoms."
But the damage of chasing phantoms proved more substantial. In 2005,
the state legislature, with the blessing of its Democratic governor,
Bill Richardson, passed legislation that essentially crippled the
ability of groups like ACORN to do mass voter registration. In 2006,
ACORN had only 10 certified canvassers in the whole state, and
registration plunged to 2,000 new applicants from 35,000 two years
before, according to ACORN's top New Mexico organizer, Matt Henderson.
In Florida in 2004, ACORN's initiative to raise the state's minimum
wage looked to be cruising to victory (it won with 71 percent of the
vote), and brought in over 200,000 newly registered voters. That led
business lobbies and the GOP to find a poster boy for fraud in a fired
ACORN employee and ex-con named Mac Stuart, who spun elaborate tales
of ACORN squirreling away hundreds of GOP voter applications it
gathered but did not turn over to election officials. Republican
attorneys filed two lawsuits featuring Stuart's claims. After the
election, Stuart ultimately conceded that he made false statements
about ACORN. In December 2005, federal judges dismissed both lawsuits.
But in the same month, the legislature passed one of the most
restrictive voting-registration laws in the country. The new law fined
every registration worker $5,000 for any lost application, potentially
wiping out the entire budget of the state League of Women Voters if
just 14 forms were lost and forcing the group to stop registering
voters for the first time in over 70 years. It was not until August
2006 that a federal judge blocked enforcement of the law. However, a
slightly revised version passed last year.
Responding to the GOP-generated hysteria over voter fraud, criminal
investigations were launched in 2004 and 2005 in Wisconsin, Colorado,
Florida, and Ohio, with ACORN often a target. But by the end of 2005,
the investigations ended after finding either no evidence of
wrongdoing by ACORN or any pervasive voter fraud. Nationally, only six
former ACORN employees were charged with registration fraud or other
election-related crimes in the 2004 election, offenses involving fewer
than 20 forms. That's out of 1 million new voters registered by ACORN
during that cycle.
Yet Thor Hearne, among others, took advantage of these assorted
investigations and news accounts about fraud to create the fictional
appearance of an epidemic, then added some fabrications of his own.
Perhaps the wildest ACVR whopper -- seized on by The Wall Street
Journal as late as November 2006 -- was the charge that ACORN and an
affiliated group were under criminal investigation for "paying crack
cocaine for fraudulent registration forms." Actually, the tale
originated with the arrest of a Toledo-area man who may have received
drugs while working for another volunteer for a now-defunct
organization, not ACORN. Without substantiation, ACVR identified
Democratic-leaning cities as hotspots for fraud. They were generally
the same locations where U.S. attorneys later faced pressure over
prosecutions, including Seattle, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. (The one
exception to overblown investigations targeting ACORN was the
indictment last year by a local Seattle prosecutor, welcomed by ACORN,
of seven rogue ex-employees who had fabricated nearly 2,000
registration forms.)
The hyped reports, indictments, and hearings had their intended effect
after the 2004 elections. Nearly 30 states considered bills to require
photo ID or proof of citizenship to register or vote. While most of
these measures haven't yet passed, those that have can be severe: An
Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship to register has
disenfranchised up to 60 percent of applicants in some counties.
Over the past few years, what began as local phony lawsuits and
investigations escalated into a concerted drive by the Civil Rights
Division to restrict voting. Since 2004, the goal of the state GOP
vote-caging initiatives has become official Justice Department policy.
The department has also promoted the equivalent of caging by
pressuring 16 states and cities to speed up their purging of hundreds
of thousands of voters through letters and lawsuits, as first reported
by Alternet.
Alarmingly, the insubstantiality of the claims of pervasive voter
fraud may not deter the U.S. Supreme Court from upholding Indiana's
restrictive voter-ID law -- which, according to a new University of
Washington study, could disenfranchise the more than 20 percent of the
state's African-American voters who lack the ID required by Indiana's
law. Amazingly, Indiana has admitted that there hasn't been a single
alleged case of in-person voter fraud in the state's history. Instead,
Indiana's attorneys and legal allies, including the federal
government, have submitted virtually nothing but unverified newspaper
clippings and right-wing claims about fraud allegations in other
states.
Indeed, the Supreme Court, in a little-noticed comment in an earlier
ruling on Arizona's ID law, has already granted government the leeway
to enact laws denying the vote based merely on fears of fraud,
regardless of evidence. But outside of the world of voting experts,
little attention has been paid to the lack of evidence in the federal
court rulings leading up to the Indiana case. As Wendy Weiser of the
Brennan Center observes, "The way this case has been decided so far
[in lower courts] is that a state doesn't have to justify measures to
suppress the vote."
The Supreme Court is expected to issue its Indiana ruling in the next
few months, and it's considered unlikely that the Court will strike
down the law.
These days, weakened by the publicity over the U.S. attorneys scandal,
the savvier voter-fraud propagandists are shifting their now-
discredited arguments about massive voting by illegal immigrants to
yet another "menace": "double voting." Republicans and some newspapers
point to lists of the same names in different states to claim there
has been large-scale double voting. Yet such sweeping double-voting
claims are almost always due to administrative errors and the
statistical probability that people with the same name and birth date
will show up in large pools of voters.
Regardless of the facts, the drive for new voter-ID restrictions will
likely be strengthened in the wake of the upcoming Supreme Court
decision. There's little sign that progressives or Democrats are going
to launch what the Brennan Center's Deborah Goldberg has called the
"huge public education effort" needed to raise awareness about the
problems with voter-ID laws. Democrats seemingly haven't yet grasped
the political importance of fighting these restrictive policies,
though they could prove a major impediment to minority voting (and if
minorities voted at the same rate as whites, there would be 7.5
million more voters on Election Day).
But Johanna Sharrard and other ACORN leaders aren't going to be
deterred by Republican obstacles and smears as they gear up for new
registration drives this year that could be their most successful yet.
Sharrard's campaign in Kentucky last year brought in over 14,000 new
voters, a state record. And after seeing all the attacks against ACORN
in Missouri and elsewhere, she realizes, "It's a good motivator; it
showed us that that things we were doing are important." It's an open
question, though, whether progressives will realize that it's worth
fighting to make sure that the voters ACORN is trying to reach will
actually have their votes count.
Reprinted with permission from Art Levine, "The Republican War on
Voting," The American Prospect, Volume 19, Number 4: March 24, 2008.
The American Prospect, 2000 L Street, Suite 717, Washington, DC 20036.
All rights reserved.
By Art Levine, The American Prospect
Posted on April 4, 2008, Printed on April 4, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/81016/
One week before the close of voter registration in Kentucky last fall,
in an election that culminated with the victory of Democratic
gubernatorial candidate Steve Beshear, Johanna Sharrard, a fresh-faced
26-year-old national organizer for the low-income advocacy group
ACORN, gathered her canvassers in a run-down Louisville office and
told them some good news: "We got 396 people yesterday -- that's
really great!" Then she added what could have seemed a jarringly
discordant note: "We know it's getting harder to reach people with the
cards in this area. It's really important that you guys are not
slipping up and turning to filling out your own applications or other
fraudulent activity. Just yesterday we had to let another person go
because she did not follow protocols." Sharrard continued sternly,
"What's important is that we get 15,000 new voters. We're not out
there to get 10,000 new voters and 5,000 false applications."
Indeed, the voter registration waged by ACORN (the Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now) in Kentucky was also an effort
to test the group's new system for rooting out any fraud. The
organization is readying itself for the challenges to voter
participation that the poor and minorities -- and Democrats -- are
sure to face in 2008.
Sharrard's cautionary tone was a response to the Republican Party's
ongoing nationwide campaign to suppress the low-income minority vote
by propagating the myth of voter fraud. Using various tactics --
including media smears, bogus lawsuits, restrictive new voting laws
and policies, and flimsy prosecutions -- Republican operatives,
election officials, and the GOP-controlled Justice Department have
limited voting access and gone after voter-registration groups such as
ACORN. Which should come as no surprise: In building support for
initiatives raising the minimum wage and kindred ballot measures,
ACORN has registered, in partnership with Project Vote, 1.6 million
largely Democratic-leaning voters since 2004. All told, non-profit
groups registered over three million new voters in 2004, about the
same time that Republican and Justice Department efforts to publicize
voter fraud and limit voting access became more widespread. And
attacking ACORN has been a central element of a systematic GOP
disenfranchisement agenda to undermine Democratic prospects before
each Election Day.
Revelations that U.S. attorneys were fired for their failure to
successfully prosecute voter fraud have revealed how fictitious the
allegations of widespread fraud actually were -- but the allegations
haven't gone away. They live on in all the vote-suppressing laws and
regulations that will likely affect this year's election, in GOP
rhetoric and, most recently, in the arguments presented by champions
of Indiana's restrictive voter-identification law in a case currently
before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, progressives have tended to pay more attention to
Election Day dirty tricks and to electronic voting machines than to a
more systemic threat: the Republican campaign to suppress the votes of
low-income, young, and minority voters through restrictive legislation
and rulings, all based on the mythic specter of voter fraud. Those
relatively transient voters, drawn to the polls this year by the Obama
and Clinton campaigns, could find themselves thwarted in November and
thereafter by the GOP-driven regime of voting restrictions --
particularly if, as many observers believe, the Court upholds
Indiana's restrictive law before it adjourns this June.
Voter fraud is actually less likely to occur than lightning striking a
person, according to data compiled by New York University's Brennan
Center for Justice. As Lorraine Minnite, a Columbia University
professor, observed in the Project Vote report, The Politics of Voter
Fraud, "The claim that voter fraud threatens the integrity of American
elections is itself a fraud." In October 2002, then-Attorney General
John Ashcroft launched an intensive "Ballot Access and Voting
Integrity Initiative" that required all U.S. attorney offices to
coordinate with local officials in combating voter fraud. Yet even
after the Justice Department declared the war against voter fraud a
"high priority," only 24 people were convicted of illegal voting in
federal elections between 2002 and 2005 -- and nobody was even charged
by Justice with impersonating another voter. (The Justice Department
declined to answer questions about more recent fraud prosecutions.)
And despite the anti-immigrant frenzy fueling photo-ID laws, only 14
noncitizens were convicted of illegally voting in federal elections
from 2002 through 2005 -- mostly because of their ignorance of
election law.
Unfortunately, the public hasn't heard just how nonexistent the voter
fraud epidemic actually is. While progressives have successfully
challenged some of the most restrictive laws in court, they're still
playing catch-up when it comes to combating the glib sound bites of
voter-fraud alarmists. Republicans and the Bush Justice Department
have cloaked their schemes under such noble-sounding concepts as
"ballot integrity." The GOP's vote-suppression playbook features
everything from phony lawsuits to questionable investigations to
authoritative-seeming reports, all with the aim of promoting
restrictive laws. These tactics were first perfected in the hotly
contested swing state of Missouri.
The roots of John Ashcroft's passion on this issue go back to the
chaos of Election Day 2000 in St. Louis, when hundreds, if not
thousands, of mostly inner-city voters were turned away from polling
places because their names were not on voting rolls. The resulting
last-minute court battle kept some polling places open for 45 minutes
after their scheduled closing time of 7 P.M. Ashcroft, then the
Republican U.S. Senate nominee, lost his race to the dead Democratic
governor, Mel Carnahan, whose name stayed on the ballot weeks after he
died in a plane crash. At an election-night party, an infuriated
Republican Sen. Kit Bond pounded the podium and screamed, "This is an
outrage!" -- and subsequently charged that Republican losses were due
in part to dogs and dead people voting. As one local government
official observed, "In St. Louis, 'dogs and dead people' is code for
black people [voting fraudulently]."
That election night gave birth to the new right-wing voter-fraud
movement, while Missouri became a proving ground for the vote-
suppression campaigns that later spread to other key states.
Missouri's then-Secretary of State Matt Blunt, now governor, launched
a trumped-up investigation that concluded that more than 1,000
fraudulent ballots had been cast in an organized scheme. A Justice
Department Civil Rights Division investigation, started before
Ashcroft shifted the department's priorities, found no fraudulent
ballots, however. Instead, it discovered that the St. Louis election
board had improperly purged 50,000 voters from the rolls.
Nonetheless, the template for smear campaigns, groundless lawsuits,
and politicized prosecutions used across the country had been set in
Missouri. Key roles were played by many of the same GOP zealots who
later made their mark on the national drive to fight voter fraud,
among them St. Louis attorney Thor Hearne, the 2004 Bush-Cheney
campaign election counsel who later launched the GOP front group, the
American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). And as early as 2002, the
executive director of the Missouri Republican Party pioneered a new
dirty trick: publicly "filing" with the Federal Election Commission a
26-page complaint against the state's leading registration group,
known as Pro Vote, that charged it with secretly conspiring with
Democrats in the Senate race -- but then failing to sign the document
so the agency never considered it.
The goal of such complaints and allegations was to create a barrage of
negative publicity about voter-registration groups and the voter-fraud
menace that could pave the way for restrictive laws. In Missouri, the
Republicans' cries for a new state photo-ID law began in 2002, before
the GOP blitz in most other states. The legislature passed such a bill
in early 2006, before it was struck down that September by a Missouri
state court as unconstitutional.
The GOP in Missouri also turned to prosecutions and lawsuits, most
either overblown or groundless. In November 2005, Bradley Schlozman,
then the Justice Department's acting civil-rights chief, insisted on
filing a lawsuit that accused Missouri's secretary of state, Robin
Carnahan, a Democrat, of failing to purge supposedly ineligible voters
under federal law. (U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was forced out in March
2006 for having balked at filing the suit.) A federal judge, who found
that the Justice Department did not produce any evidence showing fraud
justifying the purges, dismissed the lawsuit in April 2007. The
department continues to appeal the ruling.
The fraud-obsessed Schlozman was then moved into Graves' old post
without Senate confirmation, through a loophole in the Patriot Act. In
an apparent effort to discredit both Democrats and ACORN, just five
days before the tight Senate election in 2006 between incumbent
Republican Jim Talent and Democrat Claire McCaskill, Schlozman
announced, in violation of the department's own standards, the
indictment of four former ACORN workers who had been fired by ACORN
for filling out false voter-registration forms. The indictments were
part of a broader effort to tilt the campaign against Democrats by
bashing ACORN and limiting voter access. St. Louis' Republican
election director, Scott Leiendecker, sent out a chilling letter
shortly before the election to 5,000 mostly African-Americans
registered by ACORN, asking them to verify to the election board that
they were eligible to vote. Leiendecker backed off after he faced the
threat of a voting-rights lawsuit and received a warning letter from
Secretary of State Carnahan.
What began in Missouri soon went nationwide. Starting in 2003, the
Justice Department's civil-rights division issued a flurry of advisory
letters, rulings, and lawsuits under the guise of fighting fraud that
appear designed to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.
Federal and state courts have struck down some of the laws shaped by
policies promoted by the Justice Department, such as strict database-
matching laws limiting new voters in Washington state and Florida.
Even so, Justice Department-backed secretive purging policies have
targeted voter-registration applicants and current voters in several
key states: In Ohio in 2006, 303,000 voters were purged in three major
urban counties, while the Brennan Center reported that Pennsylvania's
rigid database rules, later loosened, had excluded up to 30 percent of
eligible registrants. Karl Rove aide Tim Griffin played a major role
in state GOP voter "caging" operations (that is, challenging the
eligibility of registered voters) in such states as Ohio and Florida.
These schemes, Project Vote reports, challenged the right of 77,000
mostly minority voters to cast ballots between 2004 and 2006, under
the pretext that non-forwardable letters sent by GOP activists to
their addresses were returned as undelivered. Thor Hearne's now-
vanished ACVR lobbied for strict voter-ID laws in nine states,
according to McClatchy and other news organizations. Voter-ID laws in
states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Indiana have, for now, been
allowed to stand. All these campaigns have created a kind of GOP vote-
suppression playbook that aims to limit voting rights in the states
and attack registration groups such as ACORN. In most states where
ACORN wages ballot-initiative and voter-registration campaigns,
Republican lawyers, officials, and some prosecutors routinely file
dubious lawsuits and complaints to generate bad press for the voter-
registration drives. The lawsuits seldom if ever succeed, but the bad
press they engender creates a climate to pass restrictive voting laws.
In New Mexico by the summer of 2004, ACORN's effort to register voters
in advance of the closely fought presidential election was a stunning
success: The organization registered 35,000 voters, mostly in the
Albuquerque area. "Republicans were freaking out," recalls John Boyd,
an attorney for the state Democratic Party. Republicans accused ACORN
of "manufacturing voters," conflating error-plagued cards with fraud
while trumpeting one registration card filled out in the name of a 13-
year-old boy. The boy's card became the centerpiece of the lawsuit
Rep. Joe Thompson, an Albuquerque Republican, filed in August 2004
demanding that the state government require photo ID for voters
registered by ACORN and other nonprofits. The lawsuit claimed that the
Republican plaintiffs' votes were "diluted" by supposedly false
registrations.
Their case fell apart in court, and by September, a judge dismissed
the lawsuit. But Republicans were not deterred by their loss in civil
court and pressed for a criminal investigation, a probe which U.S.
Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias started on the same day that
the court ruled against the GOP. Iglesias was a true believer in the
menace of voter fraud. As one of just two U.S. attorneys in the nation
to form such task forces, he was invited to lecture other U.S.
attorneys in 2005 as part of the annual Justice Department ballot-
integrity conference.
Iglesias' efforts weren't enough for Patrick Rogers, the Republican
National Lawyers Association point person in the state, who mounted a
campaign to pressure Iglesias to bring criminal charges before the
election, rather than form a task force. Indeed, even before Iglesias
concluded in 2006 that there wasn't enough evidence to indict on voter
fraud, major Republicans in the state had started asking the Bush
administration for his removal. In early December 2006, Iglesias was
one of seven U.S. attorneys whom the Justice Department fired.
Today, Iglesias says of voter fraud: "It's like the boogeymen parents
use to scare their children. It's very frightening, and it doesn't
exist. U.S. attorneys have better things to do with their time than
chasing voter-fraud phantoms."
But the damage of chasing phantoms proved more substantial. In 2005,
the state legislature, with the blessing of its Democratic governor,
Bill Richardson, passed legislation that essentially crippled the
ability of groups like ACORN to do mass voter registration. In 2006,
ACORN had only 10 certified canvassers in the whole state, and
registration plunged to 2,000 new applicants from 35,000 two years
before, according to ACORN's top New Mexico organizer, Matt Henderson.
In Florida in 2004, ACORN's initiative to raise the state's minimum
wage looked to be cruising to victory (it won with 71 percent of the
vote), and brought in over 200,000 newly registered voters. That led
business lobbies and the GOP to find a poster boy for fraud in a fired
ACORN employee and ex-con named Mac Stuart, who spun elaborate tales
of ACORN squirreling away hundreds of GOP voter applications it
gathered but did not turn over to election officials. Republican
attorneys filed two lawsuits featuring Stuart's claims. After the
election, Stuart ultimately conceded that he made false statements
about ACORN. In December 2005, federal judges dismissed both lawsuits.
But in the same month, the legislature passed one of the most
restrictive voting-registration laws in the country. The new law fined
every registration worker $5,000 for any lost application, potentially
wiping out the entire budget of the state League of Women Voters if
just 14 forms were lost and forcing the group to stop registering
voters for the first time in over 70 years. It was not until August
2006 that a federal judge blocked enforcement of the law. However, a
slightly revised version passed last year.
Responding to the GOP-generated hysteria over voter fraud, criminal
investigations were launched in 2004 and 2005 in Wisconsin, Colorado,
Florida, and Ohio, with ACORN often a target. But by the end of 2005,
the investigations ended after finding either no evidence of
wrongdoing by ACORN or any pervasive voter fraud. Nationally, only six
former ACORN employees were charged with registration fraud or other
election-related crimes in the 2004 election, offenses involving fewer
than 20 forms. That's out of 1 million new voters registered by ACORN
during that cycle.
Yet Thor Hearne, among others, took advantage of these assorted
investigations and news accounts about fraud to create the fictional
appearance of an epidemic, then added some fabrications of his own.
Perhaps the wildest ACVR whopper -- seized on by The Wall Street
Journal as late as November 2006 -- was the charge that ACORN and an
affiliated group were under criminal investigation for "paying crack
cocaine for fraudulent registration forms." Actually, the tale
originated with the arrest of a Toledo-area man who may have received
drugs while working for another volunteer for a now-defunct
organization, not ACORN. Without substantiation, ACVR identified
Democratic-leaning cities as hotspots for fraud. They were generally
the same locations where U.S. attorneys later faced pressure over
prosecutions, including Seattle, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. (The one
exception to overblown investigations targeting ACORN was the
indictment last year by a local Seattle prosecutor, welcomed by ACORN,
of seven rogue ex-employees who had fabricated nearly 2,000
registration forms.)
The hyped reports, indictments, and hearings had their intended effect
after the 2004 elections. Nearly 30 states considered bills to require
photo ID or proof of citizenship to register or vote. While most of
these measures haven't yet passed, those that have can be severe: An
Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship to register has
disenfranchised up to 60 percent of applicants in some counties.
Over the past few years, what began as local phony lawsuits and
investigations escalated into a concerted drive by the Civil Rights
Division to restrict voting. Since 2004, the goal of the state GOP
vote-caging initiatives has become official Justice Department policy.
The department has also promoted the equivalent of caging by
pressuring 16 states and cities to speed up their purging of hundreds
of thousands of voters through letters and lawsuits, as first reported
by Alternet.
Alarmingly, the insubstantiality of the claims of pervasive voter
fraud may not deter the U.S. Supreme Court from upholding Indiana's
restrictive voter-ID law -- which, according to a new University of
Washington study, could disenfranchise the more than 20 percent of the
state's African-American voters who lack the ID required by Indiana's
law. Amazingly, Indiana has admitted that there hasn't been a single
alleged case of in-person voter fraud in the state's history. Instead,
Indiana's attorneys and legal allies, including the federal
government, have submitted virtually nothing but unverified newspaper
clippings and right-wing claims about fraud allegations in other
states.
Indeed, the Supreme Court, in a little-noticed comment in an earlier
ruling on Arizona's ID law, has already granted government the leeway
to enact laws denying the vote based merely on fears of fraud,
regardless of evidence. But outside of the world of voting experts,
little attention has been paid to the lack of evidence in the federal
court rulings leading up to the Indiana case. As Wendy Weiser of the
Brennan Center observes, "The way this case has been decided so far
[in lower courts] is that a state doesn't have to justify measures to
suppress the vote."
The Supreme Court is expected to issue its Indiana ruling in the next
few months, and it's considered unlikely that the Court will strike
down the law.
These days, weakened by the publicity over the U.S. attorneys scandal,
the savvier voter-fraud propagandists are shifting their now-
discredited arguments about massive voting by illegal immigrants to
yet another "menace": "double voting." Republicans and some newspapers
point to lists of the same names in different states to claim there
has been large-scale double voting. Yet such sweeping double-voting
claims are almost always due to administrative errors and the
statistical probability that people with the same name and birth date
will show up in large pools of voters.
Regardless of the facts, the drive for new voter-ID restrictions will
likely be strengthened in the wake of the upcoming Supreme Court
decision. There's little sign that progressives or Democrats are going
to launch what the Brennan Center's Deborah Goldberg has called the
"huge public education effort" needed to raise awareness about the
problems with voter-ID laws. Democrats seemingly haven't yet grasped
the political importance of fighting these restrictive policies,
though they could prove a major impediment to minority voting (and if
minorities voted at the same rate as whites, there would be 7.5
million more voters on Election Day).
But Johanna Sharrard and other ACORN leaders aren't going to be
deterred by Republican obstacles and smears as they gear up for new
registration drives this year that could be their most successful yet.
Sharrard's campaign in Kentucky last year brought in over 14,000 new
voters, a state record. And after seeing all the attacks against ACORN
in Missouri and elsewhere, she realizes, "It's a good motivator; it
showed us that that things we were doing are important." It's an open
question, though, whether progressives will realize that it's worth
fighting to make sure that the voters ACORN is trying to reach will
actually have their votes count.
Reprinted with permission from Art Levine, "The Republican War on
Voting," The American Prospect, Volume 19, Number 4: March 24, 2008.
The American Prospect, 2000 L Street, Suite 717, Washington, DC 20036.
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