Ezekiel Edwards

The Fraud Behind Voter Fraud, Part II

Back in October, I posted an entry titled "The Fraud Behind Voter Fraud", in which I questioned the integrity of various Republican-led state laws, which required each voter to possess a government-issued identification card, enacted in response to the alleged problem of voter fraud. I wrote that "the major problems regarding voting legitimacy in 2000 and 2004 did not stem from voter fraud; they stemmed from registration fraud by the local and state agencies. ... I remember a vast problem of unlawful voter exclusion, not unlawful voter inclusion."

This issue resurfaced recently in the wake of the scandal surrounding the Department of Justice's (DOJ) firing of eight U.S. Attorneys in late 2006, most of whom were presiding over public corruption probes and had positive job reviews when they were dismissed. U.S. attorneys, appointed by the president, are almost never asked to leave until a new president is elected. In fact, the Congressional Research Service suggested that of 486 U.S. attorneys confirmed since 1981, perhaps no more than three were dismissed under similar circumstances, and yet seven were let go by Albert Gonzales's DOJ in a few months.

The Administration attempted to justify the firings on the basis that the attorneys had not aggressively pursued voter fraud cases. Consequently, greater attention has since been turned towards this alleged scourge. A report by the New York Times by Eric Lipton and Ian Urbina revealed that after a five-year "crackdown", the Justice Department has not turned up any evidence that voter fraud is a problem. Specifically, only 120 voter fraud cases were brought over the past four years out of over 500,000 total cases brought by the DOJ -- most of them against Democrats and many on trivial, trumped-up charges -- from which only 86 people were convicted. Hardly the epidemic suggested with furrowed brow by the Bush Administration.

A recent New York Times editorial stated: "the more we examine this issue, the more ludicrous those claims [of voter fraud] seem. Last week, we learned that the administration edited a government-ordered report on voter fraud to support its fantasy. The original version concluded that among experts 'there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud.' But the publicly released version said, 'There is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.' It's hard to see that as anything but a deliberate effort to mislead the public."

As I wrote in October: "why are certain states excluding even more Americans from voting by enacting stringent identification requirements despite scant evidence of voter fraud while doing very little to remedy the actual causes of unlawful or excessive disenfranchisement that were so rampant and well-documented overt the past six years? Why is it that minorities and the poor, whose votes were the most egregiously diluted in 2000 and 2004, are again the groups that would be most adversely affected by more stringent identification requirements? And why are Republicans, who benefited far more handsomely from those scandal-clad elections, clamoring loudly for 'reform' in the form of voter identification laws, when America should be pushing most aggressively for change, not in the form of identification requirements, but by ensuring that no registered voter be turned away from the polls, that oversight of elections be non-partisan, and that we assess the large scale risks of electoral fraud posed by electronic voting (machine malfunction and corruption of the voting system source code)?"

The Times editorial provides a transparent answer: "Because charges of voter fraud are a key component of the Republican electoral strategy. If the public believes there are rampant efforts to vote fraudulently, or to register voters improperly, it increases support for measures like special voter IDs, which work against the poor, the elderly, minorities and other disenfranchised groups that tend to support Democrats. Claims of rampant voter fraud also give the administration an excuse to cut back prosecutions of the real problem: officials who block voters' access to the polls."

In the face of two elections that raised serious questions about the legitimacy of our democracy, where (I would venture that) for every voter fraud case there were dozens upon dozens of frauds perpetrated upon legitimate voters, the Republicans decided to pursue measures that would narrow the lawful voting pool (in their favor) even further. Not only did they conjure up a phantom issue in order to pursue their nefarious objective, they attempted to use it to defend its decisions to fire DOJ attorneys who may have been conducting investigations unpopular among Administration officials.

The only serious fraud here remains the fictitious "problem" of voting fraud.

Ezekiel Edwards: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 7:00 AM, May 01, 2007 in Voting Rights
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