For the past several weeks, Republican operatives have been stepping up their efforts in critical swing states claiming voter registration groups have been engaged in a massive “voter fraud” effort in an attempt to influence the outcome of November’s presidential election.

No concrete evidence of systemic voter fraud in the United States has ever surfaced. Many election integrity experts believe claims of voter fraud are a ploy by Republicans to suppress minorities and poor people from voting.

From October 2002 to September 2005, 95 people were indicted for federal election related crimes, according to figures compiled by the New York Times last year. Seventy resulted in convictions. Only eighteen of those were for ineligible voting.

Rather than an epidemic of illegal voters casting ballots, some election experts point to a nationwide Republican strategy of exploiting those concerns to depress the voting of low-income and minority citizens and thus boost the chances of GOP candidates.

Joseph Rich, formerly chief of the voting section in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said that under the Bush administration the department “shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights.”

“Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections,” Rich wrote in a March 29, 2007, op-ed in The Los Angeles Times.

“From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.”

In March, the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration held a hearing and heard testimony from election integrity experts who said “voter fraud” is a “myth.”

In a column published in the Washington Post last year, Justin Levitt, an attorney and expert on voting issues who teaches at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and Jeff Milyo, a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia department of economics, said “the notion of widespread voter fraud… is itself a fraud. Evidence of actual fraud by individual voters is painfully skimpy.”

But the allegations of widespread “voter fraud” and allegations of fraudulent voter registration cards took on a new sense of urgency last week when law enforcement authorities in Clark County Nevada raided the offices of The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an organization that advocates voter registration and participation among low-income people and minorities.

Historically, those groups tend to vote for Democratic candidates. Raising red flags about the integrity of the ballots, experts believe, is an attempt by GOP operatives to swing elections to their candidates as well as an attempt to use the fear of criminal prosecution to discourage individuals from voting in future races.

The raid in Nevada appears to have been orchestrated by GOP operatives.

ACORN has long been a target of Republican Party operatives and Bush administration officials dating as far back as the 2004 presidential election.

An email, dated September 30, 2004, and sent to a dozen or so staffers on the Bush-Cheney campaign and the RNC, under the subject line “voter reg fraud strategy conference call,” describes how campaign staffers planned to challenge the veracity of votes in a handful of battleground states, such as Ohio, in the event of a Democratic victory.

Emails among Ohio Republican Party official Michael Magan, Coddy Johnson, then national field director of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, and Timothy Griffin, reveal the men were given documents that could be used as evidence to justify widespread voter challenges if the Bush campaign needed to contest the election results. Johnson referred to the documents as a “goldmine.”

The documents were lists of registered voters who did not return address confirmation forms to the Ohio Board of Elections. The Republican operatives compared this list with lists of voters who requested absentee ballots.
 
In the opinion of one strategist, the fact that many names appeared on both lists was evidence of voter fraud.

“A bad registration card can be an accident or fraud. A bad card AND an Absentee Ballot request is a clear case of fraud,” former Bush-Cheney campaign staffer Robert Paduchik wrote in a 2004 e-mail.

But Christopher McInerney, a RNC researcher, warned his colleagues at the time that if “other states … don’t have flagged voter rolls, we run the risk of having GOP fingerprints.”

As it turned out, the Ohio documents were not needed since the official tally put George W. Bush narrowly ahead and – despite allegations of Republican misconduct – Kerry chose not to demand a statewide recount.

Bush Weighs in on ‘Voter Fraud’

President George W. Bush said he was concerned about widespread voter fraud, despite the fact that evidence of such crimes was virtually non-existent. Bush, according to a report released earlier this month by the Justice Department’s inspector general on the U.S. Attorney firings, “spoke with Attorney General Gonzales in October 2006 about their concerns over voter fraud in three cities, one of which was Albuquerque, New Mexico.”   

Two of the nine U.S. Attorneys who were fired in 2006 were targeted because they refused to bring criminal charges against individuals affiliated with ACORN, according to interviews and the report released by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

In Missouri, U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was one of nine federal prosecutors fired in 2006 due, in part, to clashes with the Bush administration over alleged inaction on voter fraud issues.

Graves would not file criminal charges of voter fraud against four employees of ACORN, according to documents later released by the Justice Department in connection with the fired-prosecutors probe.

Graves also resisted pressure from Justice Department official Bradley Scholzman to file a civil suit against Robin Carnahan, Missouri’s Democratic Secretary of State, on charges that Carnahan failed to take action on cases of voter fraud, Graves testified last year before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Graves was forced to resign in March 2006 and was replaced by Schlozman, whom as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division’s voting-rights section had clashed with Graves.

Schlozman filed the civil suit against Carnahan, which was later dismissed by a federal court judge who ruled, “The United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States. Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred.”

Schlozman filed federal criminal charges of voter fraud against members of ACORN only days before the November 2006 mid-term elections. The case was later dismissed and Schlozman came under criticism for breaking with longstanding Justice Department policy against bringing voter fraud charges close to an election.

Schlozman testified before a Senate committee last year that he received approval to file the voter fraud charges from a Justice Department official who was instrumental in drafting the guidelines urging that U.S. Attorneys avoid filing charges claiming voter fraud at the height of an election.

ACORN Targeted in New Mexico

Former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, one of nine U.S. Attorneys fired in 2006 for partisan political reasons, recalled that the Justice Department issued a directive to every U.S. Attorney in the country to find and prosecute cases of voter fraud in their states during the height of hotly contested elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006, even though evidence of such abuses was extremely thin or non-existent.

In his recently published book, In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration, Iglesias said in late summer 2002 he received an email from the Department of Justice suggesting “in no uncertain terms” that U.S. attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials “to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases.”

“The e-mail imperatives came again in 2004 and 2006, by which time I had learned that far from being standard operating procedure for the Justice Department, the emphasis on voter irregularities was unique to the Bush administration,” Iglesias said.

In 2004, GOP operatives New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was pressured to bring charges of voter fraud against ACORN.

In the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election, Bernalillo County in New Mexico had been the target of a massive grassroots effort by ACORN to register voters.

The effort apparently paid off as registration rolls in the county increased by about 65,000 newly registered voters.

But Sheriff Darren White, who was New Mexico chairman of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, intended to challenge the integrity of some of the names on the voter registration rolls. Mary Herrera, the Bernalillo County clerk, told White that there were about 3,000 or so forms that were either incomplete or incorrectly filled out.

White seized upon the registration forms as evidence that ACORN submitted fraudulent registration forms and held a press conference along with other Republican officials in the county to call attention to the matter.

In testimony before the Senate committee earlier this year, Iglesias said he formed an election fraud task force in September 2004 to probe claims of widespread voter fraud.

In an interview, Iglesias said he fully expected to uncover instances of voter fraud based on numerous stories that appeared in New Mexico media that said minors received voter registration forms and that “a large number” of voter registration forms turned up during the course of a drug raid.

“Due to the high volume of suspected criminal activity, I believed there to be a strong likelihood of uncovering prosecutable cases,” Iglesias said. “I also reviewed the hard copy file from the last voter fraud case my office had prosecuted which dated back to 1992.

“My intention was to file prosecutions in order to send a message that voter fraud or election fraud would not be tolerated in the District of New Mexico.”

“My announcement of a dedicated task force notwithstanding, the firebrands were still not placated,” Iglesias, wrote. “I got an angry e-mail from Mickey Barnett, an attorney, who, like me, had worked on the Bush-Cheney campaign and who berated me for ‘appointing a task force to investigate voter fraud instead of bringing charges against suspects.’”

In his testimony before the Senate committee, Iglesias said the task force received about 108 complaints of alleged voter fraud through a hotline over the course of about eight weeks.

“Most of the complaints made to the hotline were clearly not prosecutable — citizens would complain of their yard signs being removed from their property and de minimis matters like that,” Iglesias testified before the Senate committee.

“Only one case of the over 100 referrals had potential. ACORN had employed a woman to register voters. The evidence showed she registered voters who did not have the legal right to vote. The law, 42 USC 1973 had the maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $5,000 fine.

“After personally reviewing the FBI investigative report and speaking to the agent, the prosecutor I had assigned, Mr. [Rumaldo] Armijo, and conferring with [a Justice Department official] I was of the opinion that the case was not provable. I, therefore, did not authorize a prosecution.

“I have subsequently learned that the State of New Mexico did not file any criminal cases as a result of the” election fraud task force.

Iglesias said that Republican officials in his state were far less interested in election reforms and more intent on suppressing votes.

According to the DOJ’s report, as the 2006 elections approached, “Patrick Rogers, the former general counsel to the New Mexico state Republican Party and a party activist, continued to complain about voter fraud issues in New Mexico,” according to the report. “In a March 2006 e-mail forwarded to Donsanto in the [DOJ's] Public Integrity Section, Rogers complained about voter fraud in New Mexico and added, “I have calls in, to the USA and his main assistant, but they were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle last election.”

In June 2006, Rogers sent Iglesias’s Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Rumaldo Armijo an email:

“The voter fraud wars continue. Any indictment of the Acorn woman would be appreciated. . . . The ACLU/Wortheim [sic] democrats will turn to the camera and suggest fraud is not an issue, because the USA would have done something by now. Carpe Diem!”

“Carpe Diem” was a reference to the Chairman of the New Mexico Democratic Party at the time, John Wertheim.