Joe Conason, Yahoo News, April 19, 2007
Even as Alberto Gonzales rehearses his excuses for the strange dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys, which he will perform in public at a Senate hearing this week, he is looking like a marginal player in this scandal. In keeping with his presidential nickname “Fredo,” the attorney general probably never understood the broader plan originating in the Bush White House.
Developed by political chief Karl Rove, that scheme was evidently designed to advance his objective of discouraging minority and other voters with the bad habit of supporting Democrats. In Republican parlance such attempts to hamper registration, intimidate citizens and reduce turnout in targeted communities are lauded as “combating voter fraud.” Several of the fired U.S. attorneys had angered party operatives, including Rove, because they had shown so little enthusiasm for trumping up fraud cases against Democrats.
Following the 2004 election, David Iglesias, then serving as the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, set up a task force to investigate Republican allegations of fraud. Those accusations boiled down to a single case of a woman who had created a few phony registrations for financial gain. When Iglesias declined prosecution, local Republicans sought a more pliable and partisan replacement — a demand eventually fulfilled by Rove and President Bush.
In Wisconsin, by contrast, U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic prosecuted voter-fraud allegations regardless of merit, winning big headlines when he indicted 14 black Milwaukee residents for casting ballots illegally. Nine of those cases were either tossed out or lost in court — an awful result compared with the normal conviction rate of over 90 percent. But at least the mediocre Biskupic managed to remain in the good graces of the White House.
The Republican cry of “voter fraud” is a specious complaint, especially when the most sustained efforts to interfere with orderly elections and voting rights in recent years can be traced to the Republican National Committee.
Harassing minority voters with bogus claims of fraud is a venerable GOP tradition, as anyone familiar with the career of the late Supreme Court Chief Justice
William Rehnquist must know. Back in the early ’60s, when Rehnquist was just another ambitious lawyer in Arizona, he ran a partisan campaign to confront black and Hispanic voters over their “qualifications.” Along with many of today’s generation of Republican leaders, he was a stalwart of the 1964 Goldwater campaign, which garnered its handful of Southern electoral votes by opposing the Voting Rights Act.