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host · 03-10-2008, 08:42 PM

reconmike's got a short memory, let's review the history of failed credibility and criminality of the president and his DOJ:

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/wa...=1&oref=slogin
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April 12, 2007
In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud
By ERIC LIPTON and IAN URBINA
Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, April 11 — Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, <h2>the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.</h2>

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, <h3>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.</h3>

In Miami, an assistant United States attorney said many cases there involved what were apparently mistakes by immigrants, not fraud.

In Wisconsin, where prosecutors have lost almost twice as many cases as they won, charges were brought against voters who filled out more than one registration form and felons seemingly unaware that they were barred from voting.

One ex-convict was so unfamiliar with the rules that he provided his prison-issued identification card, stamped “Offender,” when he registered just before voting.

A handful of convictions involved people who voted twice. More than 30 were linked to small vote-buying schemes in which candidates generally in sheriff’s or judge’s races paid voters for their support.

A federal panel, the Election Assistance Commission, reported last year that the pervasiveness of fraud was debatable. That conclusion played down findings of the consultants who said there was little evidence of it across the country, according to a review of the original report by The New York Times that was reported on Wednesday.

Mistakes and lapses in enforcing voting and registration rules routinely occur in elections, allowing thousands of ineligible voters to go to the polls. But the federal cases provide little evidence of widespread, organized fraud, prosecutors and election law experts said.

“There was nothing that we uncovered that suggested some sort of concerted effort to tilt the election,” Richard G. Frohling, an assistant United States attorney in Milwaukee, said....

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031301725.html
White House Cites Lax Voter-Fraud Investigations in U.S. Attorneys' Firings

By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 14, 2007; Page A06

White House officials, in providing new explanations of how and why several U.S. attorneys were fired in December, have said that President Bush mentioned to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in October that he had heard complaints from Congress that some federal prosecutors were lax in pursuing voter fraud.....

Quote:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm..._mckay13m.html
McKay "stunned" by report on Bush
By David Bowermaster

Seattle Times staff reporter

Former U.S. Attorney John McKay said Monday night he was "stunned" to hear President Bush told Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last October that Bush had received complaints about U.S. attorneys who were not energetically investigating voter-fraud cases.

McKay doesn't know if Republican unhappiness over his handling of the 2004 election cost him his job as U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, but the new revelations contained in a Washington Post story are sure to reignite questions about McKay's dismissal and whether it was connected to Washington state's hotly contested governor's race.

"Had anyone at the Justice Department or the White House ordered me to pursue any matter criminally in the 2004 governor's election, I would have resigned," McKay said. "There was no evidence, and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury."

The conversation between Bush and Gonzales, along with e-mails and documents that the White House plans to turn over to Congress today, suggests the firings of McKay and seven other U.S. attorneys last year may have been politically motivated, despite previous Justice Department and White House denials, according to The Washington Post.

It is not clear whether the materials shed new light on McKay's firing.

Nonetheless, Bush's concerns about voter-fraud investigations will surely heighten the spotlight on how McKay monitored the 2004 race -- and how local and federal Republican officials reacted to his inquiry.

McKay insists that top prosecutors in his office and agents from the FBI conducted a "very active" review of allegations of fraud during the election but filed no charges and did not convene a federal grand jury because "we never found any evidence of criminal conduct."....

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/wa...=1&oref=slogin
.....Richard L. Hasen, an expert in election law at the Loyola Law School, agreed, saying: “If they found a single case of a conspiracy to affect the outcome of a Congressional election or a statewide election, that would be significant. But what we see is isolated, small-scale activities that often have not shown any kind of criminal intent.”....

Quote:

http://www.slate.com/id/2166589/
<body>jurisprudence The Fraudulent Fraud Squad The incredible, disappearing American Center for Voting Rights. By Richard L. Hasen Posted Friday, May 18, 2007, at 1:41 PM ET  <div style="clear:both"></div>Imagine the National Rifle Association's <a target="_blank" href="http://nra.org/">Web site</a> suddenly disappeared, along with all the data and reports the group had ever posted on gun issues. Imagine <a target="_blank" href="http://plannedparenthood.org/">Planned Parenthood</a> inexplicably closed its doors one day, without comment from its former leaders. The scenarios are unthinkable, given how established these organizations have become. But even if something did happen to the NRA or Planned Parenthood, no doubt other gun or abortion groups would quickly fill the vacuum and push the ideas they'd pushed for years.Not so for the American Center for Voting Rights, a group that has literally just disappeared as an organization, and for which it seems no replacement group will rise up. With no notice and little comment, ACVR—the only prominent nongovernmental organization claiming that voter fraud is a major problem, a problem warranting strict rules such as voter-ID laws—simply stopped appearing at government panels and conferences. Its <a target="_blank" href="http://electionlawblog.org/archives/008186.html">Web domain name has suddenly expired</a>,<h3> its reports are all gone (except where they have been <a target="_blank" href="http://truthaboutfraud.org/analysis_reports/">preserved by its opponents</a>), and its general counsel, <a target="_blank" href="http://lathropgage.com/people/detail.aspx?attorney=1584">Mark "Thor" Hearne</a>, has <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4556">cleansed his résumé</a> of affiliation with the group. Hearne <a target="_blank" href="http://electionlawblog.org/archives/008383.html">won't speak to the press </a>about ACVR's demise.</h3> No other group has taken up the "voter fraud" mantra.The death of ACVR says a lot about the Republican strategy of raising voter fraud as a crisis in American elections. Presidential adviser Karl Rove and his allies, who have been ghostbusting illusory dead and fictional voters since the contested 2000 election, apparently mounted a two-pronged attack. One part of that attack, at the heart of the current Justice Department scandals, involved getting the DoJ and various U.S. attorneys in battleground states <a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/13/AR2007051301106.html">to vigorously prosecute cases of voter fraud</a>. That prong has failed. After exhaustive effort, the Department of Justice discovered <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html?ei=5088&en=277feccfa099c7d0&ex=1334030400&pagewanted=all">virtually no polling-place voter fraud</a>, and its efforts to fire the U.S. attorneys in battleground states who did not push the voter-fraud line enough has backfired. Even if Attorney General Gonzales <a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2166557/">declines to resign his position</a>, his reputation has been irreparably damaged.But the second prong of this attack may have proven more successful. This involved using ACVR to give "think tank" academic cachet to the unproven idea that voter fraud is a major problem in elections. That cachet would be used to support the passage of onerous voter-identification laws that depress turnout among the poor, minorities, and the elderly—groups more likely to vote Democratic. Where the Bush administration may have failed to nail illegal voters, the effort to suppress minority voting has <a target="_blank" href="http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/comments/articles.php?ID=147">borne more fruit</a>, as more states pass these laws, and courts begin to uphold them in the name of beating back waves of largely imaginary voter fraud.Perhaps even with the demise of ACVR, the hard work—of giving credibility to a nonproblem—is done. The short organizational history of ACVR, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bradblog.com/?page_id=4418">chronicled indefatigably</a> by Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog, shows that the group was founded just days before its representatives testified before a congressional committee hearing on election-administration issues chaired by then-Rep. (and now federal inmate) Bob Ney. The group was headed by Hearne, national election counsel to Bush-Cheney '04, and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=21015">staffed with other Republican operatives</a>, including Jim Dyke, a former RNC communications director. Consisting of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=1283">little more than a post-office box</a> and some staffers who wrote reports and gave helpful quotes about the pervasive problems of voter fraud to the press, the group <a target="_blank" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060210111249/www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/letterofintroduction.html">identified Democratic cities as hot spots for voter fraud</a>, then pushed the line that "election integrity" required making it harder for people to vote. The group <a target="_blank" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060209215847/http:/www.ac4vr.com/reports/032405/OhioElectionReport.pdf">issued reports</a> (PDF) on areas in the country of special concern, areas that coincidentally tended to be presidential battleground states. In many of these places, it now appears the White House was pressuring U.S. attorneys to bring more voter-fraud prosecutions.ACVR's method of argument followed a familiar line, first set out by Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund in his book, Stealing Elections. First, ACVR argued extensively by anecdote, pointing to instances of illegal conduct, such as someone, somewhere registering Mary Poppins to vote. Anecdote would then be coupled with statistics showing problems with voter rolls not being purged to remove voters who had died or moved, leaving open the potential for fraudulent voting at the polls. Finally, the group would claim that the amount of such voter fraud is hard to quantify, because it is after all illegal conduct, hidden from the public. Given this great potential for mischief, and without evidence of actual mischief, allegedly reasonable initiatives such as purging voter rolls and requiring ID seemed the natural solution.At least in hindsight, the ACVR line of argument is easily deconstructed. First, arguing by anecdote is dangerous business. <a target="_blank" href="http://projectvote.org/fileadmin/ProjectVote/Publications/Politics_of_Voter_Fraud_Final.pdf">A new report </a>(PDF) by Lorraine Minnite of Columbia University looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Almost always the allegations were followed by charges being dropped or allegations being unproven (and sometimes raised for apparently political purposes). Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented.Second, there's no question that there's a fair amount of registration fraud in this country, an artifact of the ability in many states to pay bounty hunters by the head for each new registrant. Some unscrupulous people being paid $3 to $5 for each card turned in will falsify registration information, registering pets or dead people or comic-book characters—none of whom will show up to vote on Election Day (with or without an ID). (I, for one, would turn the whole business of voter registration over to the government and couple a universal voter-registration program with a national voter-ID card paid for by the government—<a target="_blank" href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=698201">but that's another story</a>.)Third, and perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead, or missing people on the registration rolls are, and then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be Mary Poppins or Old Dead Bob, without any return guarantee—thanks to the secret ballot—that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate. Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected ("You're not my neighbor Bob who passed away last year!") and charged with a felony. And for what—$10? As someone who's thought about this a lot, if I really wanted to buy votes in an enforceable and safe way, I'd find eligible voters who would allow me to watch as they cast their absentee ballots for the candidate of my choice. Then, I would pay them. (Notably, ACVR and supporters of voter-ID laws have <a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/21/AR2005082100972.html">generally supported exemptions</a> from ID requirements for voters who use absentee ballots.) Or, I might find an election official to change the votes. Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense.Finally, on the issue of lack of detection: State and local officials have uncovered a fair amount of the absentee-ballot vote-buying I've just described, even though that behavior, too, is illegal and likely hidden from public view. The DoJ devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out polling-place fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. The <a target="_blank" href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/20070411voters_draft_report.pdf">major bipartisan draft fraud report</a> (PDF) (recently <a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2166287/entry/0/">posted </a>by Slate and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/washington/11voters.html">suppressed</a> by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission [TimesSelect subscription required]) concluded that there is very little polling-place fraud in the United States. Of the many experts the commission consulted, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2166287/entry/0/">the only dissenter</a> from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated ACVR.Perhaps it is not surprising that ACVR has collapsed as an organization. In what appears to be one of Hearne's last public appearances (where he <a target="_blank" href="http://www.eac.gov/docs/Hearne-Testimony-EAC-2006-Election.pdf">identifies himself</a> [PDF] as having served—note past tense—as counsel to ACVR) before the EAC in December of 2006, Hearne offered the usual arguments. In support of his position that voter-ID laws did not unconstitutionally suppress the votes of poor and minority voters, Hearne cited the decision of the DoJ to approve the pre-clearance of Georgia's voter-ID law, and a law review article supporting such laws, written under the pseudonym Publius. Hearne didn't reveal that the decision on Georgia <a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/16/AR2005111602504.html">was made by political appointees of the DoJ over the strong objections of career attorneys</a> there who believed the law was indeed discriminatory. Nor did he explain that (<a target="_blank" href="http://electionlawblog.org/archives/005295.html">as I discovered and blogged about </a>a few years earlier) <a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/12/AR2006041201950.html">Publius was none other than Hans von Spakovsky</a>, then serving as one of the political DoJ officials who approved the Georgia voter-ID law. (President Bush later gave <a target="_blank" href="http://www.fec.gov/members/von_Spakovsky/von_Spakovsky.shtml">von Spakovsky</a> a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission.) The arguments against vote fraud were built on a house of cards, a house that is collapsing as quickly as the U.S. attorney investigation moves forward. So Hearne let the organization collapse, and in a bit of irony, a Washington lawyer who bought the <a target="_blank" href="http://americancenterforvotingrights.com/">ACVR domain name</a> has set it <a target="_blank" href="http://electionlawblog.org/archives/008380.html">to redirect</a> to the Brennan Center's <a target="_blank" href="http://truthaboutfraud.org/analysis_reports/">Truth About Fraud</a> Web site, which debunks ACVR's claims of polling-place voter fraud. But despite the collapse of ACVR, the idea that there is massive polling-place voter fraud has, perhaps irrevocably, entered the public consciousness. It has <a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2152116/">infected even the Supreme Court's thinking about voter-ID laws</a>. And it has provided intellectual cover <a target="_blank" href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=976701">for the continued partisan pursuit</a> of voter-ID laws that may suppress minority votes. Just this week, Republican members of the Texas state Senate are trying to push through a voter-ID law over a threatened Democratic filibuster. Their political machinations have already required a Democratic state senator <a target="_blank" href="http://electionlawblog.org/archives/008406.html">recovering from a liver transplant</a> to show up to vote—and they almost passed the bill when another Democratic senator <a target="_blank" href="http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/4806873.html">came down with the stomach flu</a>. Texas legislators should be ashamed. All of this effort to enact a law that would stop a nonexistent problem. If only there were a way to ensure that <a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2136776/">spurious claims of polling-place voter fraud</a> could have disappeared with ACVR.<a target="_blank" href="http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/hasen.html">Richard L. Hasen</a>, the William H. Hannon distinguished professor at Loyola Law School, writes the <a target="_blank" href="http://electionlawblog.org/">Election Law Blog</a>. Article URL: <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2166589/" target="_blank">http://www.slate.com/id/2166589/</a><script language="JavaScript1.1" src="/revsci/dm_client.js"></script><script language="JavaScript">rs = PStax; DM_addToLoc("thisNode", rs); DM_tag();</script><noscript><img src="http://pix01.revsci.net/J05531/a3/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/noscript.gif" /></noscript></div></body>

Quote:

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/17168096.htm
Posted on Wed, May. 02, 2007

U. S. ATTORNEYS
2006 Missouri's election was ground zero for GOP
By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers

.....The threat to the integrity of the election was seen as so grave that Bradley Schlozman, the acting chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and later the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, twice wielded the power of the federal government to try to protect the balloting. The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly also stepped into action.

Now, six months after freshman Missouri Sen. Jim Talent's defeat handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate, disclosures in the wake of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys show that that Republican campaign to protect the balloting was not as it appeared. No significant voter fraud was ever proved.

The preoccupation with ballot fraud in Missouri was part of a wider national effort that critics charge was aimed at protecting the Republican majority in Congress by dampening Democratic turnout. That effort included stiffer voter-identification requirements, wholesale purges of names from lists of registered voters and tight policing of liberal get-out-the-vote drives.

Bush administration officials deny those claims. But they've gotten traction in recent weeks because three of the U.S. attorneys ousted by the Justice Department charge that they lost their jobs because they failed to prove Republican allegations of voter fraud. They say their inquiries found little evidence to support the claims.

Few have endorsed the strategy of pursuing allegations of voter fraud with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove. And nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri.

Before last fall's election:

-Schlozman, while he was acting civil rights chief, authorized a suit accusing the state of failing to eliminate legions of ineligible people from lists of registered voters. A federal judge tossed out the suit this April 13, saying Democratic Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan couldn't police local registration rolls and noting that the government had produced no evidence of fraud.

-The Missouri General Assembly - with the White House's help - narrowly passed a law requiring voters to show photo identification cards, which Carnahan estimated would disenfranchise 200,000 voters. The state Supreme Court voided the law as unconstitutional before the election.

-Two weeks before the election, the St. Louis Board of Elections sent letters threatening to disqualify 5,000 newly registered minority voters if they failed to verify their identities promptly, a move - instigated by a Republican appointee - that may have violated federal law. After an outcry, the board rescinded the threat.

-Five days before the election, Schlozman, then interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, announced indictments of four voter-registration workers for a Democratic-leaning group on charges of submitting phony applications, despite a Justice Department policy discouraging such action close to an election.

-In an interview with conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt a couple of days before the election, Rove said he'd just visited Missouri and had met with Republican strategists who "are well aware of" the threat of voter fraud. He said the party had "a large number of lawyers that are standing by, trained and ready to intervene" to keep the election clean.

Missouri Republicans have railed about alleged voter fraud ever since President Bush narrowly won the White House in the chaotic 2000 election and Missouri Republican Sen. John Ashcroft lost to a dead man, the late Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan, whose name stayed on the ballot weeks after he died in a plane crash.

Joining the push to contain "voter fraud" were Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., who charged that votes by dogs and dead people had defeated Ashcroft, Missouri Republican Gov. Matt Blunt, whose stinging allegations of fraud were later debunked, <h2>and St. Louis lawyer Mark "Thor" Hearne, national counsel to Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, who set up a nonprofit group to publicize allegations of voter fraud.</h2>

Many Democrats contend that the efforts amount to a voter-suppression campaign.

"The real problem has never been vote fraud," said Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo. "It's access to the polls. In the last 50 years, no one in Missouri has been prosecuted for impersonating someone else at the polls. But thousands of eligible voters have been denied their constitutional rights. . . . It's sickening.".....

Besides the president's hyped lies about voter fraud that wasn't there, the biggest impact of this propaganda "Op" was engineered by Bush/Cheney 2004 Campaign "National Counsel", Marc Thor Hrearne who created the fake, "authorative" "American Center for Voting Rights" ACVR, which spread it's distortions about voter fraud, and then poof.....it disappeared.

<h3>Tell me, reconmike, if I don't have all this right, this deliberate attempt to destroy the non-partisan professionalism in the DOJ by Bush partisan criminals, what is the accurate account? Where is Thor Hearne's ACVR, read the Loyola Law Prof's article in SLATE.com, displayed above.....if ACVR was a legitimate organization describing an actual voting fraud problem?</h3>