Where is the REAL voter fraud?

Josh Marshall describes the real voting fraud problem. It is the one the facts support, not the one where voters are supposedly voting twice.

For the last six years the Bush Department of Justice had made a major priority of prosecuting cases of voting fraud where people either registered twice to vote or where ineligible voters registered to vote. In the last four years, they have successfully prosecuted 86 such individuals. Not for voting more than once, mind you, but for registering more than once to vote or registering to vote when not eligible. There is no indication that any elections depended on the votes cast by people not eligible to vote. Most of those successful prosecutions were for what was recognizably an administrative error, rather for intent to vote illegally, but with the pressure to prosecute any suspected voter fraud many of these people have been convicted of a felony because they made a mistake on a voters registration form or a voters registration clerk accidentally registered someone twice.

The accusations by Republicans of massive voter fraud have been used to pass laws making it more difficult for low income and minority voters to register or to actually vote. This has resulted in noticeably depressed voting by those groups. That has caused elections to change from what most people wanted.

Most noticeably this was the case in Florida in the year 2000 when voter suppression activities by the then Secretary of State Katherine Harris caused thousands of properly registered eligible Black voters to be removed from the rolls because their names resembled the names on lists of ex-felons. [The lists were culled from all over the United States, yet only 7 states do not automatically return the right to vote to felons who have successfully completed their sentences. Then the computers were set to remove anyone whose name closely resembled that of a felon, with cross-checks eliminated. Thousands of eligible voters were removed from the voting rolls. Then most were not informed that their registration was cancelled until they went in to vote.]

Why do the Republicans use such scant evidence (or even none at all) to scream about massive voter fraud? Here is what Josh Marshall writes:

Republican party officials and elected officials use bogus claims of vote fraud to do three things:

• 1) to stymie voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in poor and minority neighborhoods,
• 2) purge voter rolls of legitimate voters and
• 3) institute voter ID laws aimed at making it harder for low-income and minority voters to vote.

This sounds like hyperbole but it is simply the truth. (A great example of this in microcosm was the 2002 senate election in South Dakota -- Johnson v. Thune -- in which Republicans spent the entire election ranting about a massive voter fraud conspiracy on the state's Indian reservations, charges which turned out to be completely bogus but had the aim of keeping voting down on the reservations....)

The connection to the US attorney Purge is that a number of the fired US attorneys have been removed because they failed to bring criminal charges against people who committed technical violations of election laws with no intent of voting illegally. They have been replaced by highly partisan individuals who have no hesitation to convict someone for making an inadvertent error without any intent to commit a crime. That is, the Department of Justice is replacing ethical US attorneys with unethical ones who will use their very significant legal powers to advance the fate of the Republican Party rather than to control crime.

This effort at the Department of Justice was initiated and pushed through by Karl Rove. TPM Muckraker has clearly documented this based on the documents the Department of Justice has provided to Congress.

If Rove's actions and those of the Department of Justice do not constitute voter fraud, then the term "voter fraud" has lost all rational meaning.