My friend John Spence over at The Spenny Post has a great post on the recent uproar in right-wing circles over ACORN’s supposed connection to massive voter fraud and the crisis in the US housing market. The mainstream media, in particular the increasingly irrelevant Fox News, give prominent coverage to baseless accusations made by pundits and political operatives, while real investigations into the issue are swept aside and ignored. The accusations against ACORN are particularly fraudulent when one considers it was ACORN itself that not only reported to the authorities the false registrations made by some of their canvassers, but that they were the ones actually defrauded. ACORN paid employees who lied about the number of voters they registered. If any damage has been done, it’s been against ACORN.
A year ago the NY Times reported that after five years of intensive investigations the US Justice Department, rather than finding the massive fraud consistently alleged, “has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections.” During this time there were 86 convictions, most of which were because people “mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules.”
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.
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.”
So what is really behind this oft-repeated mantra of voter fraud? Spence points to the fact that “those 1.3 million new voters [registered by ACORN in the last two years] are more than likely to vote for Barack Obama than John McCain.” And this gets at the heart of the matter. Political science professor Lori Minnite of Bernard College, who has investigated the issue over the lasts eight years, tells journalist Andrew Burmon it’s all nothing more than a “strategic ruse.”
Rather than protecting the election process from voter fraud — a problem that barely exists — Minnite says the true aim of Republican efforts appears to be voter suppression across the partisan divide. According to Minnite, investigating voter fraud has become a Republican cottage industry over the last 20 years because it justifies questioning the eligibility of thousands of would-be voters — often targeting poor and minority citizens in urban areas that lean Democratic. Playing the role of vigilant watchdog gives GOP bureaucrats a pretext for obstructing the path of marginalized and first-time voters headed for the polls.
Essentially the issue is: the more voters, the worse for Republicans, especially this year where a large majority of the newly registered are young people and poor African Americans, demographics heavily in favor of Barack Obama. Investigative journalist Greg Palast has been covering the issue of vote rigging and voter suppresion at least since 2001. He recounts what happened in 2004:
In Ohio, during the 2004 Presidential election, 153,237 ballots were simply thrown away — more than the Bush “victory” margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was five times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush’s triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. The official number is bad enough — 1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, according to the federal government’s Elections Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count.
Correcting for that under-reporting, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. Why doesn’t your government tell you this?
Unsurprisingly those most likely to have their ballots rejected are minority groups, blacks and Native Americans, both heavily Democratic. In looking at purged voter rolls in 2008, the NY Times notes that Colorado has rejected more than 37,000 voters since August 1. And party affiliation matters. Thirty-three percent of all registered voters in the state are Democrats, 35% Republican, and 31% are unaffiliated, yet 37% of purged voters were Democrats while only 28% were Repulican.
More than half the voters purged voted in the last two election cycles (54% in 2006 and 51% in 2004). The Times article doubts whether there has been a concerted effort to purge voters and points to increased screening regulations as a result of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. Yet, it fails to look into the political and ideological motivations behind HAVA in the first place. It is precisely this piece of disasterous legislation that has been essential to the concerted effort to purge unwanted voters from the rolls.
Technorati Tags: Election 2008, politics, voter suppression
