The right-wing fraud of "voter fraud" accusations

Josh Marshall explains the Republican fraud involved in accusations of voter fraud.

Rumors of "wide spread voter fraud" have invariably turned out to be exaggerated,administrative errors or flat out right wing lies designed to justify voter suppression efforts aimed to prevent Democrats from voting.

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Other posts on right wing voter suppression:

• McCain's really, really bad day May 25, 2008
• Texas (Republican) Attorney General practices voter suppression May 19, 2008
• How one Republican rigged elections for the RNC December 20, 2007
• Caging: What Bob Woodward doesn't know (or care) about Voter Suppression November 23, 2007
  
• Another great moment in voter suppression November 22, 2007
  
• Florida Republicans working hard to suppress minority voter registrations November 20, 2007
  
• Vote Suppression is the issue May 26, 2007
  
• "Caging" - an explanation of the term May 23, 2007
  
• Where is the REAL voter fraud? April 12, 2007
  
• More on the New Hampshire phone-jamming incident April 24, 2006
  
• More evidence that the 2004 election was hacked for Bush April 09, 2006

There is a pattern here. This should be enough evidence to demonstrate that the Republicans have a nationwide plan to prevent Democratic voters from casting ballots.

How one Republican rigged elections for the RNC

Allen Raymond, the former GOP consultant of New Hampshire phone jamming fame, is not happy about his fellow Republicans blaming the phone jamming on him. So he has written a tell-all book entitled How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Law Breaker. Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker has an advance copy and has published a few things from the book.

Allen Raymond was sent to prison for 90 days because the telephone firm he owned accepted a job from the New Hampshire GOP's executive director was hired to jam the telephone number that the Democratic party was using to arrange rides for voters who wanted to vote for the Democratic candidate for Senate.

To set the scene: Raymond got a call in 2000* from two former colleagues in New Jersey who ran a consulting shop called Jamestown Associates. They were working for Dick Zimmer, who was running against Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), the incumbent, and they were pulling out all the stops.

They'd already succeeded in getting a Green Party candidate on the ballot to drain liberal votes from Holt (a favorite GOP trick). And they had already put Raymond's firm to work calling Green-oriented households and urging them to support the Green candidate.

But what came next was "even better":

[Tom Blakely from Jamestown Associates] called me up and asked, "How do you guys find voice talent?"

"Well, I've got a whole catalog of different voices on CDs. I've got 'single Northeastern female,' I've got 'Southern belle' -- what are you looking for?"

"We're targeting Democrats of Eastern European descent using a surname select and geopolitical filter."

"Oh," I said, quickly doing the polarizing-voter math in my head. "How about 'angry black man'?"

"Yeah, that sounds good. What's his voice sound like?"

So I cued up one particular actor's CD on my computer and put the phone to the speaker. The track I played was one in which the actor was deliberately playing up a street gang character.

After listening for a few seconds, Blakely said, "That's the guy!"

So we had the actor record a spot over the telephone saying, "I'm calling as a Democrat, asking you to vote for the Democratic nominee. We need your vote for Holt."

I'm not saying that all Eastern European whites are racists, but, no matter where or when an election is held, there is a always a cultural divide that you can rely on. The message was "I'm ghetto black calling you, racist Ukrainian guy, and scaring the crap out of you because you probably think that if you don't vote for the Democrat I'm going to come to your house and take care of some business."

The calls were extremely highly targeted, household by household, no message ever left on an answering machine. We wanted the message heard only by people whose reaction would be "I'm not voting for Holt because he uses scary black men to call my house."

We made calls to Democratic union households supporting Zimmer, taped by actors putting on thick Spanish accents, figuring union workers were the voters who felt most threatened by immigration. The objective was to get them to throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. We were just forcing those people to make a decision that was true to who they really were. If you want to question someone's character, look to the people who stayed home because of those calls.

Remember -- they were Democrats; they were supposed to be the tolerant ones.

Zimmer lost the election by 481 votes and the Green Party candidate picked up 2 percent in the polls.

This is Republican ethics.

Consider this along with the techniques of voter suppression they have practiced:

• Caging: What Bob Woodward doesn't know (or care) about Voter Suppression
  
• Another great moment in voter suppression
  
• Florida Republicans working hard to suppress minority voter registrations
  
• Vote Suppression is the issue
  
• "Caging" - an explanation of the term
  
• Where is the REAL voter fraud?
  
• More on the New Hampshire phone-jamming incident
  
• More evidence that the 2004 election was hacked for Bush

DOJ has moved to takeover control of voting machines in New York State

We knew that the Department of Justice under Alberto Gonzalez was as crooked as a dog's hind leg, but most of us were unaware of the way the DOJ Civil Rights Division , run by corrupt hacks like of Brad Schlozman, Hans von Spakovsky and John Tanner, want total control of the voting machines used in the State of New York.

Looseheadprop at Firedoglake presents the story here. Looseheadprop is an attorney who has dug into the story. Go read it.

One of the slogans looked particularly appropriate to me is Who did your voting machine vote for?

Republicans can't be honest and get voters to donate to them.

If you are a Republican and are having difficulty getting donations, what do you do? There are a lot of answers, but one that is characteristic of the Republican Party is that you lie to elderly people and try to frighten them into sending the Republicans money. Here is a report from Paul Keil at TPMMuckraker:

What 83 year-old William Sidwell of Queen City, Missouri found in his mailbox last week scared him. It was a letter from the Republican National Committee, but it seemed to bear grave news: "Our records show that you registered as a member of our Party in Schuyler County, MO," the letter said. "But a recent audit of your Party affiliation turned up some irregularities."

Audit? Irregularities? Was he in trouble? Were they threatening him? Sidwell went immediately to his ask his son, Dennis, a licensed public accountant, for advice. You can see the letter, and the accompanying "Voter Registration Verification and Audit Form," right here. Particularly puzzling to the both of them, Dennis told me, is that his father is a life-long Democrat.

[Go read the TPMMuckraker article to see an image of the letter.]

The letter, it turns out, is just a misleading pitch for a contribution to the RNC -- one of the "irregularities" cited in the letter is that "I cannot find a record of you taking a single action in support of the Republican Party -- not locally, not nationally!" A contribution, the letter suggests, would help set the record straight.

If this were a letter that frightened an elderly person into donating money to a religious organization it would legally be fraud. Legal or not, it is totally unethical.

Unethical as it is, it is also representative of the way the Republican Party of today operates.

Vote Suppression is the issue

The Republican Party has stolen the Presidential election in 2000 and in 2004, and Americans are dying because of it. So are Iraqis, for that matter. But it's not just a case of misprogrammed diebold voting machines. Mostly the vote is rigged by suppressing turnout of likely Democratic voters. Buzzflash interviewed Gregg Palast:

Greg Palast: 2004. And in 2006 and 2004, they challenged tens of thousands of black soldiers. They stopped their votes from being counted when they were mailed in from Baghdad. Go to Baghdad and lose your vote -- mission accomplished.

BuzzFlash: How did they do that?

Greg Palast: By sending letters to the homes of soldiers, marked "do not forward." When they came back undelivered, they said: Aha! Illegal voter registered from a false address. And when their ballot came in from Fallujah, it was challenged. The soldier didn’t know it. Their vote was lost. Over half a million votes were challenged and lost by the Republicans -- absentee ballots. Three million voters who went to the polls found themselves challenged by the Republicans. This was not a small operation. It was a multi-million dollar, wholesale theft operation.

I’m working with Bobby Kennedy, who is a voting rights attorney. He said, “This is not just an icky, horrible thing that people do wearing white sheets. This is a felony crime.” [paraphrase] And the guy they put in charge of this criminal ring to knock out voters is a guy named Tim Griffin. Today, Tim Griffin is -- badda-bing -- U.S. Attorney for Arkansas. When they fired the honest guys, they put in the Rove-bots to fix the 2008 election. That’s what I’m saying -- it’s already being stolen, as we speak. Tim Griffin is the perpetrator who’s become the prosecutor, and that’s what’s going down right now.

This is why Tim Griffin was sent to replace Bud Cummins, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Dud Cummings was apparently too law abiding for Rove to trust to kill any investigation of vote suppression or vote stealing in Arkansas.

Of course, the Republcans don't always conduct vote suppression. Sometimes there is nothing for it but to resort purely to good, old fashion vote stealing.

Greg Palast: I have it all in Armed Madhouse - Updated Edition, including in the three new chapters. First and foremost, is that it’s not one thing. It ain’t just electronic voting, guys. You go, oh, we have paper ballots, we’re saved, we’re saved. Bulls***! Wake up! Hello! Let’s remember that in Florida and Ohio, they didn’t have computer voting. So all the stuff about Diebold -- Ohio was not stolen by computers, because they didn’t have computers there. In fact, they were thrilled when people complained about computers because they could keep the junky punch cards in. That doesn’t mean that computers are safe. As I point out in the new chapter, the Republicans held on to Katherine Harris’ seat -- and we don’t want to think too carefully about that image -- they held onto Katherine Harris’ seat with 300 votes, while 18,000 votes disappeared in the computers. So they do use computers. That was a pure, straight-up, shoplift of the Congressional seat.

BuzzFlash: A House committee just voted not to pursue an investigation of that election, despite the disappearance of 18,000 votes.

Greg Palast: That’s sick -- deeply, deviously sick. First of all, in New York and other states, when votes are in question, they simply redo them. People talk about recount -- forget it. Redo the vote. When the machines collapse, then there’s no question that there was monkey business.

BuzzFlash: Then why do you think --

Greg Palast: -- why don’t Democrats stand up?

BuzzFlash: The U.S. House of Representatives is controlled by Democrats. It’s like saying, well, $320 million is missing from a bank but we’re not going to investigate that.

Greg Palast: You’re forgetting it’s not about the two parties. Vote theft is mainly a racial issue in America, and it’s a class issue. The white caucus is a lot bigger than the black caucus. They don’t call the Congress a millionaire’s club for nothing. There aren’t many guys in there -- or women -- who are not millionaires. So it’s the millionaires versus us. It’s the white caucus versus the black caucus, which is of great concern. So the vote is along racial class and economic lines, not along party lines. Party lines are pretty much meaningless. There’s pretty much one party -- the party of the cash. But I’m not one of these people that says there’s no difference between the Democratic and Republican Party. The question is: is the difference meaningful? That’s all. When it comes down to voter issues, remember that the Democrats in power there were elected under the racist, broken, classist system. If you fix the voting system, a third of those Democrats could never win a primary. The last thing that they want is poor people to vote.

The USA is the oldest Republic existing on Earth today. It has been a two century plus experiment, and my reading of twentieth century history has suggested to me that powerful industrial societies are forced to adopt many of the characteristics of a Republic. But Bush and the conservative Republicans have been proving that the dangers to a Republic that are inherent in a powerful Chief Executive who is also Commander in Chief are very real. The five decades of WW II and the Cold War allowed the forces opposing democracy to gain a great deal of power, and the end of the Cold War did not make them want to give it up.

We are seeing the backlash against the end of the Cold War, augmented by 9/11. Terrorism is a major problem, but it is not a war, nor is it an inherent characteristic of Islamic societies. But they want to define it that way because it allows the non-democratic American nationalists to throw out the freedoms from an autocratic government that we Americans have gotten used to.

That's what this vote changing, voter suppression, vote stealing and election stealing is all about. Those given power to deal with a nuclear-armed USSR will not give up that power just because the threat is gone. They are fighting the loss of that power, but it must be taken from them. That is the lesson provided by the Bush/Cheney administration.

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See also:

• Rudi Guiliani - an example of the "new" GOP.

The American Center for Voting Rights has vanished without explanation.

The American Center for Voting Rights, an organization established to stop fraudulent voting, has disappeared. Here is what Richard L. Hasen at Slate wrote about it:

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 Web domain name has suddenly expired, its reports are all gone (except where they have been preserved by its opponents), and its general counsel, Mark "Thor" Hearne, has cleansed his résumé of affiliation with the group. Hearne won't speak to the press about ACVR's demise. 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 to vigorously prosecute cases of voter fraud. That prong has failed. After exhaustive effort, the Department of Justice discovered virtually no polling-place voter fraud, 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 declines to resign his position, his reputation has been irreparably damaged.

Now that we know at least nine U.S. Attorneys were "asked to resign" over the issue of not brining enough cases of voter fraud in courts, what happened? That is essentially 10% of the total 93 U.S. Attorneys.

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 borne more fruit, 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, chronicled indefatigably 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 staffed with other Republican operatives, including Jim Dyke, a former RNC communications director.

Consisting of little more than a post-office box and some staffers who wrote reports and gave helpful quotes about the pervasive problems of voter fraud to the press, the group identified Democratic cities as hot spots for voter fraud, then pushed the line that "election integrity" required making it harder for people to vote. The group issued reports (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.

It's pretty clear from the firings of the U.S. Attorneys followed by the resulting exposure of the politicization of the Department of Justice and now the overnight disappearance of the American Center for Voting Rights that the fraud was not by voters but by the Bush White House.

Bradblog has been discussing vote rigging

For a series of blogs on the Clint Curtis / Tom Feeney / Yang Enterprises Inc. (YEI) Voting-Rigging Scandal [Key Articles & Documents]voter fraud] go to Bradblog. This series started in December 2004 and runs up to recent stories.

Republicans reduce Democratic vote by claims of vote fraud

Here's another story that the mainstream press doesn't want to report. The frequent accusations of "Vote Fraud" by Republicans is a cover for actually depressing the overall vote and convincing mostly Democratic voters not to vote. McClatchy has the story.

Then Digby builds on the McClatchy story.

White House working to limit voter turnout.

The Purge of the U.S. attorneys is closely related to efforts by the White House to reduce the number of lower income and minority people on the voters rolls. The effort to keep likely Democratic voters from being successfully registered or from voting is also the reason for the Republican complaints about organized voting fraud after each of the elections since 2000. Now we have another report on this effort to prevent voters from opposing Republicans by using the Justice Department. The report comes from McClatchy Newspapers:

By GREG GORDON of McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates, according to civil rights advocates and a former administration official.

The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.

Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Questions about the administration's campaign against alleged voter fraud have helped fuel the political tempest over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom were ousted in part because they did not bring voter fraud cases important to Republican politicians.

Civil rights advocates contend that the administration's policies were intended to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters, who tend to support Democrats. By filing state and federal lawsuits, civil rights groups have won court rulings blocking some of its actions. [Snip]

Voting laws

Former Justice Department lawyers, public records and other documents show that since President Bush took office, political appointees in the Civil Rights Division have:

Approved Georgia and Arizona laws that tightened voter ID requirements. A federal judge tossed out the Georgia law as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of poor voters, and a federal appeals court signaled its objections to the Arizona law on similar grounds last fall.

Issued advisory opinions that overstated a 2002 federal election law by asserting that it required states to disqualify new voting registrants if their identification didn't match that in computer databases, prompting at least three states to reject tens of thousands of applicants mistakenly.

Done little to enforce a provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act that requires state public assistance agencies to register voters. The inaction has contributed to a 50 percent decline in annual registrations at those agencies, to 1 million from 2 million.

Sued at least six states on grounds that they had too many people on their voter rolls. Some eligible voters were removed in the resulting purges.

Carol Lam, US attorney of San Diego was apparently asked to resign because she was too active in pursuing criminal cases against crooked Republican politicians like Duke Cunningham and John Doolittle. The US attorney of Arkansas was asked to resign so that a political operative who was an aide to Karl Rove could take the job and get some experience as a real attorney to put on his resume. The others were asked to resign because of complaints that they had not brought cases against Democrats just before the election or were not bringing voter fraud cases that Republican politicians thought that they should be able to take to court.

Then there is US attorney Biskupic of Milwaukee, WI who was removed from the list after (because?) he brought a high profile case against a Wisconsin civil servant for steering a state contract for travel services to a travel firm owned by a family which apparently donated political money mostly to Democrats. This case became the only real issue the Republican candidate to defeat the existing Democratic Governor from being reelected, but when the case reached the Appeals Court the Appeal Justices literally threw it out of court, saying that it was not based on any evidence and that the Prosecutor provided no credible evidence that any crime had been committed. Not only was she not shown to get any personal benefit from giving the contract to the travel agency (a requirement to prove fraud) and no evidence that she knew that the family that owned the travel agency were supporters of the Democratic Party, the agencies' bid was the low bid submitted.

The Executive Department generally and the Department of Justice have been so politicized by the Bush administration, including Alberto Gonzales, that it may take years to rebuild the government after Bush leaves office. This report is just one more of the many, many ways the Republicans have worked to destroy America.

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Addendum 8:11 PM CDT.
Digby has a great deal more about the Republican effort to use false accusations about voter fraud to reduce Democratic voter turnout. As usual his reporting is thorough, well-sourced, and well-written. Go enjoy it.

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.

Voter Fraud? The Republicans lie to suppress Democratic votes

Here is something the Washington Post got correct. (Obviously not written by Fred Hiatt.) It is an editorial published today. First, remember that the US attorney for Washington State, John McKay, was fired because he failed to bring indictments against Democrats for voter fraud in the extremely narrow (under 100 votes) win by the Democratic candidate for Governor.

Allegations of voter fraud -- someone sneaking into the polls to cast an illicit vote -- have been pushed in recent years by partisans seeking to justify proof-of-citizenship and other restrictive ID requirements as a condition of voting. Scare stories abound on the Internet and on editorial pages, and they quickly become accepted wisdom.

But the notion of widespread voter fraud, as these prosecutors found out, is itself a fraud. Firing a prosecutor for failing to find wide voter fraud is like firing a park ranger for failing to find Sasquatch. Where fraud exists, of course, it should be prosecuted and punished. (And politicians have been stuffing ballot boxes and buying votes since senators wore togas; Lyndon Johnson won a 1948 Senate race after his partisans famously "found" a box of votes well after the election.) Yet evidence of actual fraud by individual voters is painfully skimpy.

Before and after every close election, politicians and pundits proclaim: The dead are voting, foreigners are voting, people are voting twice. On closer examination, though, most such allegations don't pan out. Consider a list of supposedly dead voters in Upstate New York that was much touted last October. Where reporters looked into names on the list, it turned out that the voters were, to quote Monty Python, "not dead yet."

Or consider Washington state, where McKay closely watched the photo-finish gubernatorial election of 2004. A challenge to ostensibly noncitizen voters was lodged in April 2005 on the questionable basis of "foreign-sounding names." After an election there last year in which more than 2 million votes were cast, following much controversy, only one ballot ended up under suspicion for double-voting. That makes sense. A person casting two votes risks jail time and a fine for minimal gain. Proven voter fraud, statistically, happens about as often as death by lightning strike.

Yet the stories have taken on the character of urban myth. Alarmingly, the Supreme Court suggested in a ruling last year ( Purcell v. Gonzalez) that fear of fraud might in some circumstances justify laws that have the consequence of disenfranchising voters. But it's already happening -- those chasing imaginary fraud are actually taking preventive steps that would disenfranchise millions of real live Americans.[Editor - Highlighting is mine.]

Remember, this is individual voter fraud being discussed in this editorial. The Republican allegations of individual voter fraud is primarily a set of allegations to be used to justify installing rules to require forms of identification not usually carried by many non-Republican voters. These rules are primarily intended to suppress the total vote by non-Republicans.

Problems with the voting system

Eli at Firedoglake has a really good analysis of the problems with our American voting system. I especially like his three-level analysis. Go Read it.

Oh, and the DLC has apparently lost it's Tax Exempt Status with the IRS because they only beneift a selected group - Democrats. Their argument?

Don't laugh. Their argument is that many of their positions benefit Republicans more than they do Democrats. Isn't that what we real Democrats have been saying about the DLC for years? And they have kept denying it.