Gonzalez and Schlozman and Griffin may be gone, but the long-term politicization and damage at the DoJ was done and institutionalized long ago. The usual suspects — Thor Hearne, Hans von Spakovsky, Joe Tanner, et al. — are still plying their insidious anti-democracy trade with all of the tools of big Republican government at their disposal.
If you Dems think “nothing could possibly go wrong in 2008,” you’d better think again. As Steve Rosenfeld at AlterNet reports, the Republicans aren’t taking ’08 lying down. Not by a long shot.
Earlier this year, the DoJ sent another round of threatening letters to 10 key battleground states, threatening to sue them if they do not purge their voter rolls. Yes, the Republicanists have found a “legal” way to use the DoJ to do the illegal vote-caging work the party and their phony well-funded “grass-roots” used to have to do. No wonder Thor’s American Center for Voting Rights was able to go “out of business.”
The DoJ is the new ACVR.
“They want more people showing up on Election Day and not finding their names,” former DoJ Voting Section attorney David Becker, now of People for the American Way (PFAW), tells Rosenfeld. “They want people not voting.”
If you don’t haven time to read Rosenfeld’s entire in-depth investigative report (which should have been on the front page of the NY Times) here are a few of the key grafs…
…
“That data does not say what they purport it says,” said David Becker, People for the American Way Foundation’s senior voting rights counsel and a former Voting Section senior trial attorney, after reviewing the letters and statistics used to call for the purges. “They are saying the data shows the 10 worst voter rolls. They have a lot of explaining to do.”
“You are basically seeing them grasping at whatever straws are possible to make their point,” said Kim Brace, a consultant who helped the U.S. Election Assistance Commission prepare its 2004 National Voter Registration Act report, which contains the data tables cited by the Voting Section letter to identify the errant states.
The Justice Department would not comment for this report, despite repeated requests.
…
The voter roll purges are part of an unprecedented effort at the Justice Department to eliminate “voter fraud,” which, as defined by Republican activists, is an assumption that Democratic political operatives or sympathetic political organizations have filed fake voter registrations or encouraged supporters to vote more than once to win elections. These claims have been investigated by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and academics and found to be without merit.
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Looking toward the 2008 election, it appears the purges could be a new and legal way to accomplish a controversial longstanding Republican Party electoral tactic — thinning the ranks of likely Democratic voters in states where there may be close races.
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“To me, it’s a very clear view of the Republican agenda,” said Joe Rich, who resigned as Voting Section Chief in 2005 after 35 years in the Justice Department, speaking of the voter purge initiative. “The GOP agenda is to make it harder to vote. You purge voters. You don’t register voters. This is ripe for partisan decision making. You pick the states where you go after Democrats.”
“This stuff disenfranchises voters,” said Becker. “There are eligible voters who will be removed. There is no evidence that rolls need to be cleaned up to this degree. This will make things more chaotic on Election Day. People will be given provisional ballots that won’t get counted.”
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“This is a real problem,” said PFAW’s David Becker. “The Department of Justice is the nuclear bomb of voting enforcement. If the DOJ sends a letter, the counties listen, even if they do not have a strong basis to force them to act.”
…
“I think it is impossible to claim that this should be a trigger to require a NVRA list maintenance purge,” Becker said. “This is a short but sloppy way to figure out and justify something that goes beyond the data. They want more people showing up on Election Day and not finding their names. They want people not voting.”
Since the DOJ is politically motivated then we now have the loop complete.
You will never vote again.
This is something to bring up during the confirmation hearings for the next Attorney General.
Let Senator Leahy know. He is the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That committee has to approve of any nominee before the nominee goes to a floor vote in the Senate.
Democratic Party County offices each of the 10 states targeted by the Department of Justice’s Voting Section for the voter purge must establish an anti-purge action plan.
Local Democratic Party offices should add an element to their ’08 voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns to tell people how to check their Voter Registration Status before the registration deadline in their respective counties.
Many counties now have a Voter Registration Status web page where voters can enter their name and birth date to check their status. For example, the Voter Registration Status web page for Washington, DC is at http://www.dcboee.org/voterreg/vic_step1.asp
“Voter Registration Status” campaigns could be as simple as putting pressure on local TV and Radio stations and newspapers to make public service announcements giving Voter Registration Status web page addresses for their county.
Brad,
It’s JOHN Tanner, not Joe. Joe Rich was the former chief of the Voting Section. He’s testified in front of Congress repeatedly on the hijinks at DOJ and is one of the good guys.
Its between batman and the penguin.
No, actually its between real voters and their RoV offices. MAKE SURE YOUR VOTE IS ON FILE BEFORE THE ELECTION. Simple as that, done right, hmmmmmmmm…
Of coarse I meant your registration.
The congressional aide to Bob Ney received probation for his crimes in NeyGate.
Does anyone remember that it was Ney who modified the housing laws and inspired the bubble that burst, and will cause millions of americans housing grief?
Something is wrong in the Department of
JusticeJust Us when no snitching means no crime.The bushie hiring doctrine is designed to prevent crime 🙂 …
Find out which 10 states these are and e-mail this to the SoS in each one of them.
The bastages.
I second Carol at #9 – we need to make the SOS’s aware of this. In fact, probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to make the SOS’s of ALL 50 STATES aware of this effort by the DOJ.
Can’t the U.S. Congress investigate this action by DOJ?
– Tom