Fraudulent Firings - Questioning "Laudable" Goals
- From: "Catherine" <Catherine@yahoo!!!.com>
- Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 18:51:21 GMT
here?s a new piece of mine from the Baltimore Sun, on the audacity of the
administration trying to justify the US Attorney firings in terms of combating
election fraud. Please pass it on to anyone who might be interested, and feel free
to post or reprint it.
From The Baltimore Sun March 17, 2007
FRAUDULENT FIRINGS
By Paul Rogat Loeb
They just wanted to protect the sanctity of the vote. That?s the administration?s
pious explanation for why they fired eight U.S. Attorneys who were Republican enough
for Bush to have appointed them in the first place.
"The president recalls hearing complaints about election fraud not being vigorously
prosecuted and believes he may have informally mentioned it to the attorney general,?
explained White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.
How could you question such a laudable goal?
Of course the justifications keep shifting, as with the Iraqi war. First it was the
general performance of the prosecutors. Then a preference for specific replacements.
Now it?s concern for the democratic process.
But the administration and its allies have a long history of using the specter of
election fraud to justify reprehensible actions. In 2000, Jeb Bush claimed to be
fighting potential fraud when he purged over 55,000 voters from the Florida rolls for
felony convictions that never applied under state law?or never existed to begin with
(for instance if someone had a name similar to a convicted felon). Staffers of the
data-collection firm that handled this effort acknowledged that the purges
disproportionately targeted low-income Democrats, particularly African Americans. A
follow-up by BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast found that 90 percent of those
scrubbed were legitimate voters, enough by far to have made Al Gore the winner. And
the Supreme Court that handed Bush the presidency was led by William Rehnquist, who
got his start harassing black and Hispanic voters in South Phoenix as part of a
Republican effort called Operation Eagle Eye.
Election fraud was also the watchword in 2004. Ohio Secretary of State (and Bush
state campaign chair) Ken Blackwell claimed he was just protecting the legitimacy of
the vote when he knocked 300,000 voters off the rolls in key Democratic cities like
Cleveland, far exceeding Bush?s margin of victory. Blackwell also tried to reject new
Democratic registrations because an arcane law said they were supposed to be on
80-pound paper stock (presumably more secure), then had to back off when his own
official forms failed the same criterion. And he went to court to ensure that
provisional ballots would be considered only if cast in the right precinct, defeating
their key purpose, even as he sowed voter confusion by pulling machines and closing
down polling stations in longstanding Democratic neighborhoods.
But maybe voting integrity really is the issue in the current wave of firings. In the
same 2004 election, according to Mr. Palast in another BBC report, Karl Rove aide
Timothy Griffin, just named the new U.S. Attorney for eastern Arkansas, originated a
strategy to send 70,000 letters challenging the addresses of black and Hispanic
voters in places like Florida?s Jacksonville Naval Air Station, a local homeless
shelter, and the historically black Edward Waters College. As Mr Palast writes,
Republicans sent the letters out with do-not-forward instructions. When they came
back undeliverable, as when soldiers were deployed overseas, Florida then struck the
voters from the rolls so even absentee ballots no longer counted. Maybe that?s what
White House Spokeswoman Perino meant by showing concern for the sanctity of the vote.
If election fraud was a legitimate issue, such abuses might have a shred of
legitimacy. Yet the documented cases of deliberate illegal voting are minuscule. For
reports entitled ?Securing the Vote? and ?The Politics of Voter Fraud,? the think
tank Demos and the civic involvement group Project Vote conducted national studies,
seeking documented evidence of actual fraud. They ran comprehensive searches of
newspapers and court records, contacted secretaries of state and state attorneys
general. Except for cases involving a handful of isolated individuals, every rumor of
illegitimate voting turned out to be baseless. The image of armies of unregistered,
illegal, and dead people swarming the polls was and is a Republican myth.
But it?s a convenient one to try to damp registration and turnout. In Florida ,
Republicans created such draconian restrictions on registration drives that the
League of Women Voters stopped their registration work. In Missouri then-governor
John Ashcroft twice vetoed legislation that would allow groups like the League to
register voters in inner city St Louis . In Maryland , Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a
Republican, warned about voter fraud in opposing early voting. Ironically, his 2006
campaign and that of Republican Senate candidate and then-Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele
then bused in homeless men from Philadelphia to hand out misleading fliers in black
neighborhoods featuring photographs of former Rep. Kweisi Mfume and Prince George?s
County Executive Jack Johnson with the words "Ehrlich-Steele Democrats" ? though
Mfume and Johnson had unequivocally endorsed the Democratic opponents of Ehrlich and
Steele.
As for the fired U.S. attorneys ? in the end, what was their sin? It seemed that
they weren?t sufficiently enthusiastic about joining compatriots who investigated or
indicted local Democrats by a nearly five to one margin over Republicans, often with
election eve headlines that melted away, along with their cases, as soon as the polls
were closed. Some may have refused to go after Democratic groups who were trying to
register voters, or in the words of fired US Attorney John McKay of Washington
State, ?to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury? in a situation where ?there
was no evidence.? San Diego ?s Carol Lam even had the audacity to prosecute
Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham and begin to investigate Congressman Jerry
Lewis.
Perhaps this solidly Republican group actually believed their job was to serve all of
America ?s citizens, instead of playing the role of political attack dogs. It?s too
bad that couldn?t be the standard for the administration that terminated them.
*******Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A
Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the
History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of
a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To
receive his monthly articles email sympa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with the subject line:
subscribe paulloeb-articles
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