"And The Colossal Chutzpah Award Goes To Karl Rove"
Jack Balkin writes on Balkinization: During the past seven years of the Bush Administration, Republican officials have continuously claimed that there has been massive voter fraud; they have pushed for voter id laws that will suppress turnout among elderly, minority, and immigrant voters, who-- entirely coincidentally-- are likely to vote Democratic. These arguments were made repeatedly in the face of all evidence to the contrary; indeed, when a bi-partisan federal panel concluded that the claims of widespread voter fraud were largely baseless, Bush Administration officials appear to have put pressure to modify the report's findings to make them more ambiguous. Today, in a follow-up story, the New York Times reports that the Bush Justice Department's strenuous efforts to discover and prosecute voter fraud have come up largely empty, finding only sporadic and isolated examples, often by people who lacked information about how to register to vote properly.
The great irony of all this is that there was a systematic and successful attempt at electoral fraud, this one an effort to keep eligible voters from casting ballots. It was staged by the Republican Party in Florida in 2000 in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act. That conspiracy to violate federal law led to the victory of the Bush Administration, which, in turn has used its power to try to cement a new Republican majority by every method it could think of-- some legal, and others illegal. That same Administration has also, of course, shamelessly exploited the tragedy of 9-11 to demonize its political opponents and divert attention from its numerous failures and incompetencies-- and, through various tricks and devices, managed to finagle the country into a disastrous war in Iraq, destroying lives and fortunes, and thoroughly undermining American interests abroad for decades to come. -- Balkinization