The DemocratICK Party has a long and storied history of election fraud in this country, yet somehow the New York Times seems to have ignored that history in today's editorial. Not only that, they have explicitly labeled GOP attempts to ensure clean elections as "code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people." Funny -- as an elected party official who sits on the county party's Ballot Security Committee, I've never been issued that code book.

Let's look at the fantasy offered by the editorialist board at the Times.

In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings.

In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. By resisting pressure to crack down on “fraud,” the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been standing up for the integrity of the election system.

Let's begin with a reminder that every single one of those prosecutors, according to federal law, serves at the pleasure of the President of the United States, and he can fire them for any reason, or for no reason at all. There is nothing wrong or unethical about doing so -- as we were repeatedly assured by the Clinton Administration after Janet Reno fired all 93 in one fell swoop, including one who was a month away from indicting Dan Rostenkowski and another who was investigating the Whitewater Affair and the connection of the Rose Law Firm to it.

But moving on, please consider this -- for all the claims that there simply is no voter fraud on the DemocratICK side, the Times is lying. Let's see, there was the conviction of a half dozen Democrats in East St. Louis, Illinois, on charges of buying votes. The cases involving ACORN and its fraudulent registration of non-existent voters are too numerous to list. There were serious questions regarding the counting of provisional ballots in heavily DemocratICK Nashville in 2004. Evidence exists of at least 900 illegal votes being cast in Milwaukee on Election Day, 2004, as well as an attack on vehicles rented by the Republican Party by DemocratICK activists. In New Mexico (one of the states where a US Attorney was fired), the Bernalillo County clerk's office had to invalidate 25% of provisional ballots cast because the address where the person was registered didn't exist. Sorry, folks, but DemocratICK election fraud exists on a massive scale nationwide -- and complaining about it is not about suppressing votes, it is about cleaning up elections.

John McKay, one of the fired attorneys, says he was pressured by Republicans to bring voter fraud charges after the 2004 Washington governor’s race, which a Democrat, Christine Gregoire, won after two recounts. Republicans were trying to overturn an election result they did not like, but Mr. McKay refused to go along. “There was no evidence,” he said, “and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.”

Later, when he interviewed with Harriet Miers, then the White House counsel, for a federal judgeship that he ultimately did not get, he says, he was asked to explain “criticism that I mishandled the 2004 governor’s election.”

Yeah, nothing to look at here -- despite the fact taht votes kept miraculously appearing in King County -- a major DemocrtaICK stronghold -- and the number of votes counted exceeded the number of votes cast by more than the margin of victory. Could you imagine the outcry if something like that had happened in favor of a Republican candidate for governor -- they NY Times would be demanding investigations and prosecutions.

Mr. McKay is not the only one of the federal attorneys who may have been brought down for refusing to pursue dubious voter fraud cases. Before David Iglesias of New Mexico was fired, prominent New Mexico Republicans reportedly complained repeatedly to Karl Rove about Mr. IglesiasÂ’s failure to indict Democrats for voter fraud. The White House said that last October, just weeks before Mr. McKay and most of the others were fired, President Bush complained that United States attorneys were not pursuing voter fraud aggressively enough.

As i pointed out, there is evidence of voter fraud by Democrats in New Mexico -- this prosecutor simply lacked the will to go after it.

There is no evidence of rampant voter fraud in this country. Rather, Republicans under Mr. Bush have used such allegations as an excuse to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning groups. They have intimidated Native American voter registration campaigners in South Dakota with baseless charges of fraud. They have pushed through harsh voter ID bills in states like Georgia and Missouri, both blocked by the courts, that were designed to make it hard for people who lack drivers’ licenses — who are disproportionately poor, elderly or members of minorities — to vote. Florida passed a law placing such onerous conditions on voter registration drives, which register many members of minorities and poor people, that the League of Women Voters of Florida suspended its registration work in the state.

Again, there is plenty of evidence of voter fraud in this country -- and more surfaces every election cycle. The problem is that it is not often prosecuted, because it benefits Democrats and such prosecutions open Republicans up to charges like those made by the NY Times of vote suppression.

The claims of vote fraud used to promote these measures usually fall apart on close inspection, as Mr. McKay saw. Missouri Republicans have long charged that St. Louis voters, by which they mean black voters, registered as living on vacant lots. But when The St. Louis Post-Dispatch checked, it found that thousands of people lived in buildings on lots that the city had erroneously classified as vacant.

Oddly enough, though, the NY Times forgets that in 2000 an injunction to continue voting past the legal poll closing time was obtained on behalf of a dead man in St. Louis.

The United States attorney purge appears to have been prompted by an array of improper political motives. Carol Lam, the San Diego attorney, seems to have been fired to stop her from continuing an investigation that put Republican officials and campaign contributors at risk. These charges, like the accusation that Mr. McKay and other United States attorneys were insufficiently aggressive about voter fraud, are a way of saying, without actually saying, that they would not use their offices to help Republicans win elections. It does not justify their firing; it makes their firing a graver offense.

If this charge can be proved, I'll gladly support prosecutions of those involved. But they cannot and will not be proved -- because the NY Times is lying through its teeth -- just like in the preceding paragraphs of the editorial.

Posted by: Greg at 02:31 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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