ELECTION '08
The Truth About Voter Fraud

As the 2008 election process draws near -- and with early voting in many states having already begun -- conservatives are raising a great hue and cry about the threat of voter fraud. Attacks have centered on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the "nation's largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people," whose workers have registered 1.3 million new voters this year. Conservatives like Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) and former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell have seized on reports of improperly filled-out forms as evidence of "lawlessness" and "voting fraud," which will lead to "the kind of chaos you expect from a category-five hurricane." But mass voter fraud is just a conservative myth used to justify increasing the difficulty of the voting process. In an interview with Salon, Lori Minnite, a professor of political science at Barnard College who investigated allegations of widespread voter fraud, explained, "From 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once. That's 26 criminal voters -- voters who vote twice, impersonate other people, vote without being a resident ... Meanwhile thousands of people are getting turned away at the polls."

COMPLEX AND ONEROUS RULES: Although the United States has a long and dark history of voter disenfranchisement and voter suppression, recent laws passed at the state and federal level have focused instead on the vaporous threat of voter fraud. These laws particularly discourage the poor and the young. Because voting, even for federal elections, is regulated by state law and administered at the local level, there is no consistent standard for voting machines, ballot design, the counting of provisional ballots, or voter identification. The 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires that "any voter who has not previously voted in a federal election" must provide a form of ID.  But "twenty-four states have broader voter identification requirements than what HAVA mandates" -- seven require photo ID for all voters, and 17 more require some form of ID. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana's draconian photo ID law that could disenfranchise as many as 400,000 voters, although Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita "conceded the state has never presented a case of 'voter impersonation.'" In his dissent, Justice David Souter compared Indiana's unjustified regulations to a poll tax, "because it correlates with no state interest so well as it does with the object of deterring poorer residents from exercising the franchise." 

MASS DISENFRANCHISEMENT AND INTIMIDATION: Last week, the New York Times reported that "[t]ens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law." Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy issued a scathing order Wednesday "lambasting the Montana Republican Party for challenging the registrations of thousands of Montana voters," writing, "The timing of these challenges is so transparent that it defies common sense to believe the purpose is anything but political chicanery." On Sunday, the Ohio Republican Party "requested information on voters who registered to vote and cast an early ballot on the same day," not long after Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer requested registration information -- including driver's license and Social Security numbers -- "for the 302 voters who took advantage of the window in that county, which has five colleges and universities, including two historically black colleges." In Indiana, state NAACP president Barbara Bolling said voters in three northern cities "are being disenfranchised each day they can't cast ballots at their local clerk's offices," after "two Republicans on the Lake County Election Board voted against the sites last month, contending in-person absentee voting makes vote fraud easier." In Colorado, the El Paso county clerk Bob Balink has engaged in an "emerging and consistent pattern" of purging voter rolls and challenging inaccurate registration information as "election fraud." 

ROVE'S FINGERPRINTS: The Department of Justice, whose responsibilities include ensuring the right to fair elections, was subverted by the Bush administration to pursue the false threat of voter fraud. In 2002, former attorney general John Ashcroft announced an initiative that required "all components of the Department" to "place a high priority on the investigation and prosecution of election fraud." The 2006 purge of eight U.S. attorneys -- all lifelong Republicans -- at the behest of the Bush White House exposed the depths of this politicization. The White House justified the dismissals by telling reporters, "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." As the Washington Post reported last year, "Nearly half the U.S. attorneys slated for removal by the administration last year were targets of Republican complaints that they were lax on voter fraud, including efforts by presidential adviser Karl Rove to encourage more prosecutions of election-law violations." Rove has made it his specialty to raise the specter of vote fraud throughout his political career, from his days working on state races in Alabama.

 

Under the Radar

ADMINISTRATION -- BUSH ISSUES TWO NEW SIGNING STATEMENTS: The New York Times reports today that President Bush issued signing statements on Tuesday asserting "that he had the executive power to bypass several parts of two bills: a military authorization act and a measure giving inspectors general greater independence from White House control." In the authorization bill, Bush objected to being required to enter "negotiations for an agreement by which Iraq would share some of the costs of the American military operations there" and a prohibition on the use of U.S. funds "being used 'to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq.'" President Bush has challenged over 1,100 sections of laws during his two terms, while "all previous presidents combined challenged about 600 sections of bills." Prominent conservatives, including Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), have repeatedly introduced legislation to ban the use of signing statements. The American Bar Associations calls signing statements "contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers." A recent House Armed Services Committee report found that Bush's justifications for his signing statements are often "broad and unsubstantiated."

CONGRESS -- BIPARTISAN HOUSE REPORT FINDS BUSH MADE 'INAPPROPRIATE' USE OF EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE: Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee released a bipartisan report finding that President Bush made a "legally unprecedented and an inappropriate use of executive privilege" when the administration withheld Patrick Fitzgerald's interview with Vice President Cheney on the CIA leak scandal. Attorney General Michael Mukasey had previously told the committee "that Bush's refusal to release the Cheney interview was within the president's authority, under executive privilege, to keep his discussions with advisers private." But the report, which was signed by Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and ranking Republican Tom Davis (R-VA), argued that "there is no reason to believe that the special counsel's interview with the vice president" relates to "presidential decision-making about foreign policy or national security." White House spokesman Tony Fratto dismissed the report as a "campaign attack." The committee also released a separate report criticizing Bush's assertion of executive privilege regarding his recent climate change and Clean Air Act decisions, saying that they were "wrong and an abuse of the privilege."

ECONOMY -- LEHMAN BROS. APPROVED $100 MILLION EXECUTIVE PAYOUT DAYS BEFORE BANKRUPTCY: The Times of London reports that the Lehman Brothers board "signed off on more than $100m (£59m) in payouts to five top executives just three days before the bank went bankrupt leaving thousands of employees out of work." While the executives ultimately never received the payments because the Wall Street giant filed for bankruptcy, "the pay deals will further inflame the debate raging about executive pay as the global financial crisis accelerates." In fact, in the two years prior to Lehman's collapse, the same executives "were generously remunerated while overseeing forays into risky commercial real-estate investments that helped to bring the company down." Nonetheless, Lehman wasn't the only big time financial firm operating unheaded despite the current financial crisis. Last week, a House committee discovered that, just one week after the federal government bailed out insurance giant AIG, company executives went on a retreat to a luxury resort costing nearly $500,000.

Think Fast

Budget officials announced yesterday "that the federal deficit has soared to a record $455 billion. ... The final accounting for fiscal 2008 produced a larger shortfall than had been projected, reflecting the start of federal efforts to address the economic emergency." The previous record deficit had been $413 billion, reached in 2004.

The Bush administration "issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects." CIA director George Tenet requested the memos "more than a year after" the program began because "senior CIA officials were troubled" that the White House had never endorsed it in writing.

Rep. Tim Mahoney (D-FL), "who faces accusations that he had an affair with a former aide and paid her to keep quiet about it," was also reportedly "having an affair with a second woman around the same time, a person close to his campaign told The Associated Press on Tuesday."

The number of U.S. jobs paying a poverty-level wage increased by 4.7 million between 2002 and 2006, according to a new report by The Working Poor Families Project. "The alarming news is that both the number and percentage of low-income families increased during this period," said Brandon Roberts, co-author of the report. "This was a time when we had solid and robust economic growth."

A soon-to-be completed U.S. intelligence assessment portrays the situation in Pakistan as "very bad," "very bleak," and "on the edge," according to U.S. officials who spoke to McClatchy. One official summarized the estimate's conclusions about the state of Pakistan as: "no money, no energy, no government."

Bush administration officials, in their last weeks in office, "are pushing to rewrite a wide array of federal rules with changes or additions that could block product-safety lawsuits by consumers and states." The language is "aimed at pre-empting product-liability litigation into 50 rules governing everything from motorcycle brakes to pain medicine."

And finally: Yesterday, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued an unusual dissent that was more "Supreme Court noir" than traditional legalese. Roberts wrote a dissent from denial of review in Pennsylvania v. Dunlap, "a fairly routine drug arrest case raising 'probable cause' issues." Mystery writer Paul Levine speculated on Roberts's shift: "My guess is that the Chief lost a bet with Scalia on the baseball playoffs. If Roberts wins the next wager, Scalia will have to write an opinion in iambic pentameter." Read Roberts's writing here.

Good News

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) said Tuesday he will introduce legislation to outlaw so-called naked credit default swaps, which have contributed to the recent fall of American International Group.

State Watch

OHIO: Federal appeals court orders Ohio's top elections official to set up a system "to verify the eligibility of newly registered voters."

MASSACHUSETTS: "Enrollment at the state's public universities and colleges climbed more than 4 percent this fall."

ECONOMY: "Would spending billions putting engineers and construction crews to work rebuilding the nation's aging infrastructure keep America out of a recession?"

Blog Watch

THINK PROGRESS: "Axis of Evil" author compares MSNBC's Rachel Maddow to racist hecklers.

YGLESIAS: George McGovern and the Employee Free Choice Act.

LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY: The moral component of neoconservativism.

DAILY BEAST: Did PBS bury an expose on torture?

Daily Grill

GLENN BECK: How long has it taken us to go to a $10 trillion [debt]? ... How many years? 
MOORE: It took us, you know, 200 years to get to this situation. 
-- Walll Street Journal editorial writer Stephen Moore, 10/14/08

VERSUS

"On the day President Bush took office, the national debt stood at $5.727 trillion. The latest number from the Treasury Department shows the national debt now stands at more than $9.849 trillion. That's a 71.9 percent increase on Mr. Bush's watch."
-- CBS News, 9/29/08