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New Mexico GOP Attorney's 'Voter Fraud' Claims Unravels
By Jason Leopold (about the author) Page 3 of 4 page(s)
“In most cases, voters should not be interviewed, or other voter-related investigation done, until after the election is over,” according to the Justice Department’s guidelines for election offenses as revised in May 2007 during Gonzales’s tenure as Attorney General.
In a brief interview Wednesday, Iglesias, the former New Mexico U.S. Attorney who was fired as part of the White House-driven federal prosecutor purge in 2006, said he doesn’t know “who lit the fire under the [New Mexico] FBI regarding alleged voter fraud.”
Iglesias said he was surprised that the FBI would have agreed to investigate ACORN now and that the inquiry must have received a green light from high levels of the Justice Department.
Iglesias said that in September 2004, he set up an election fraud task force, to investigate allegations that ACORN was involved in voter registration fraud.
“The FBI in [New Mexico] was skittish when I raised the voter fraud task force that I formed back in 2004 because the SAC [Special Agent in Charge} said the FBI General Counsel said such investigations were discouraged due to the appearance of being too ‘political,’" Iglesias said.
“I had to twist their arms for them to get involved and only after I assured them that no prosecutions would be filed before the election. … I wonder why the FBI went from being skittish back in 2004 to being forward leaning now. Who is pressuring them and why?"
Rogers and other GOP officials claim ACORN has turned Bernalillo County into a hotbed of voter fraud and voter registration fraud.
The allegations first surfaced in 2004, when Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White showed up at the county clerk's office demanding to know if there were any questionable voter registrations on file.
Mary Herrera, the Bernalillo County clerk, told White that there were about 3,000 or so forms that were either incomplete or incorrectly filled out.
Bernalillo County had been the target of a massive grassroots effort by the group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to register voters, which paid off with about 65,000 newly registered voters.
But Sheriff White intended to challenge the integrity of some of the names on the voter registration rolls.
White seized upon the registration forms as evidence that ACORN submitted fraudulent registration forms. He held a press conference along with other Republican officials in the county to call attention to the matter.
White pushed Iglesias to crack down on Democratic-backed voter registration drives.
Iglesias established an election fraud task force in September 2004 and spent more than two months probing claims of widespread 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."
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