This New York Times article about the chimerical nature of 'voter fraud' (and the administration's extraordinary efforts to find or invent it) reminds me of the one and only case of voter fraud of which I have personal knowledge.
It was in the early '80s in Santa Cruz, in a hard-fought and acrimonious local election. Santa Cruz had been dominated by chamber-of-commerce conservatives for years, but the balance was tipping toward the leftist faction associated with UCSC. In this very close election, the leftists finally got a majority on the City Council.
This guy I knew named JD had recently moved downtown from campus and re-registered to vote. After the election, JD went around telling people he had voted twice, because he was still registered on campus. He told us this as if it were just the cleverest thing in the world. We all told him it was unbelievably stupid. (It was not, however, atypical of JD; for example, one time in an IRA bar on St. Patrick's Day he ordered a Bushmill's. Not the sharpest tack in the carpet.)
The Chamber-of-Commerce conservatives did not take kindly to losing (they never do), and claimed that there was massive voter fraud in the form of students voting both on campus and in town. There was, of course, a huge investigation. The huge investigation uncovered exactly...one case. The case we all knew about. JD got off without any jail time, but with a shitload of community service.
The 'voter fraud' thing was bogus then, and it's bogus now. The Times piece pretty much confirms what we already know, but adds details about the nature of the cases the DOJ prosecuted, and the extent of the politicized obsession with 'voter fraud' in the department. The former is heartbreaking and infuriating (for example, one woman went to jail for a year for voting while on probation); the latter is essential background on the prosecutor purge.
Josh Marshall puts it all in perspective:
Republican party officials and elected officials use bogus claims of vote fraud to do three things: 1) to stymie voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in poor and minority neighborhoods, 2) purge voter rolls of legitimate voters and 3) institute voter ID laws aimed at making it harder for low-income and minority voters to vote....Read the whole thing--both the whole things.
The tie-in with the US Attorney story is that the White House and the Republican National Committee have used the power of the Department of Justice to accomplish those three goals that I outlined above. Only most of the relatively non-partisan and professional US Attorneys simply didn't find any actual fraud. Choosing not to indict people on bogus charges got at least two of the US Attorneys (Iglesias and McKay) fired....In turn they've been replaced by a new crop of highly-political party operative prosecutors who, in the gentle wording of the Times, "may not be so reticent" about issuing indictments against people who have committed technical voting infractions with no intent to cast a fraudulent ballot. Along the way, the fever to find someone, anyone guilty of committing even a technical infraction has landed folks like Ms. Prude in the slammer. They are what you might call the prosecutorial road kill in the Rove Republican party's effort to ride roughshod over American citizens' voting rights to entrench the GOP as the country's permanent electoral majority.
Who's running all this? Who's put it all in motion. Look at the documents that have already been released. It's been run out of Karl Rove's office at the White House.
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