However, Justin Levitt, an attorney and an expert on voting issues who teaches at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, wrote last year click here that "the notion of widespread voter fraud ... is itself a fraud. Evidence of actual fraud by individual voters is painfully skimpy."
The numbers are fairly small. From October 2002 to September 2005, 95 people were indicted for federal election related crimes, according to figures click here compiled by the New York Times last year. Seventy resulted in convictions. Only eighteen of those were for ineligible voting.
Voting Fraud Myth?
In March, the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration held a hearing to determine whether voter fraud is a “myth” and if voter identification laws actually disenfranchise legitimate voters.
Former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who was one of nine prosecutors fired around the 2006 election, told the panel that he established an election fraud task force in September 2004 and spent more than two months probing claims of voter fraud in his state.
"After examining the evidence, and in conjunction with the Justice Department Election Crimes Unit and the FBI, I could not find any cases I could prosecute beyond a reasonable doubt," Iglesias said. "Accordingly, I did not authorize any voter fraud related prosecutions."
Iglesias said he is certain that his firing was due, in part, to the fact that he would not file criminal charges of voter fraud in New Mexico.
Iglesias added that, based on "Karl Rove's obsession with voter fraud issues throughout the country," he now believes GOP operatives wanted him to go after pro-Democratic organizations in an attempt to swing the 2006 midterm elections to Republicans.
Iglesias said in an interview that Hearne’s associate, Pat Rogers, a Republican attorney in Albuquerque, and Mickey Barnett, a Republican lobbyist, pressured him to bring charges of voter fraud. Iglesias also came under pressure from Sen. Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico.
After Iglesias was fired, Rogers, the former chief counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party, emerged as Domenici’s favorite to be the new U.S. Attorney for New Mexico.
In previous e-mails exchanges, Rogers insisted that he did not play a role in Iglesias's firing and categorically denied that he pressured Iglesias to bring charges of voter fraud against Democrats.
Shortly after details of Iglesias’s firing surfaced, Hearne’s ACVR Web site was dismantled.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which is still investigating the U.S. Attorney firings, interviewed Rumaldo Armijo, Iglesias's former executive assistant, to find out whether he was pressured by Rogers, Barnett or Hearne to file criminal charges of voter fraud in the state in 2004.
During his tenure in the U.S. Attorney's office, Armijo was in charge of voter issues and worked with Iglesias's task force to probe the matter, Iglesias confirmed.
Missouri Cases
In Missouri, U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was another federal prosecutor who fell into disfavor with the Bush administration because of alleged inaction on voter fraud issues.
Graves would not file criminal charges of voter fraud against four employees of ACORN, a group that registers low-income individuals who tend to cast votes for Democrats, according to documents later released by the Justice Department in connection with the fired-prosecutors probe.
Graves also resisted pressure from Justice Department official Bradley Scholzman to file a civil suit against Robin Carnahan, Missouri's Democratic Secretary of State, on charges that Carnahan failed to take action on cases of voter fraud, Graves testified last year before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Jason Leopold is editor of the online investigative news magazine The Public Record, http://www.pubrecord.org, and the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie," a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. He is also a two-time winner of the Project Censored award, most recently, in 2007, for an investigative story related to Halliburton's work in Iran. He was recently named the recipient of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation's Thomas Jefferson Award for a series of stories he wrote that exposed how soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been pressured to accept fundamentalist Christianity.
