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Fired US Attorney Details GOP Effort to "Cage" Votes in New Mexico in 2004

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Historically, those groups tend to vote for Democratic candidates. Raising red flags about the integrity of the ballots, experts believe, is an attempt by GOP operatives to swing elections to their candidates as well as an attempt to use the fear of criminal prosecution to discourage individuals from voting in future races.

In his book, specifically in the "Caging" chapter, Iglesias says that right when the Bush-Kerry race began to heat up, some Republicans in Bernalillo County, led by local Bush/Cheney campaign chairman Sheriff Darren White, showed up a the county clerk's office demanding to know if there were any questionable voter registrations on file. White is campaigning for the congressional seat that will be vacated this year by Heather Wilson, the Republican Congresswoman from New Mexico who is the subject of a House Ethics Committee probe based on phone calls that may have been improper he placed to Iglesias inquiring about the timing of indictments prior to the 2006 midterm elections.

In the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election, 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. The effort apparently paid off as registration rolls in the county increased by about 65,000 newly registered voters.

Sheriff White, Iglesias wrote, intended to challenge the integrity of some of the names on the voter registration rolls. 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. White seized upon the registration forms as evidence that ACORN submitted fraudulent registration forms and held a press conference along with other Republican officials in the county to call attention to the matter.

In testimony before the Senate committee last week, Iglesias said when he announced the formation of his election fraud task force in September 2004 he fully expected to uncover instances of voter fraud based on numerous stories that appeared in New Mexico media that said minors received voter registration forms and that "a large number" of voter registration forms turned up during the course of a drug raid.

"Due to the high volume of suspected criminal activity, I believed there to be a strong likelihood of uncovering prosecutable cases," Iglesias said. "I also reviewed the hard copy file from the last voter fraud case my office had prosecuted which dated back to 1992. My intention was to file prosecutions in order to send a message that voter fraud or election fraud would not be tolerated in the District of New Mexico."

Meanwhile, New Mexico Republicans had filed a civil suit in an attempt to force changes to the state's voter identification statutes.

"The case was duly dismissed," Iglesias wrote his book, "which only served to stoke the fires of voter fraud frenzy."

Iglesias's by the book work ethic only appeared to incite Republicans in New Mexico who expected the federal prosecutor to put loyalty to the Republican Party above the law.

"My announcement of a dedicated task force notwithstanding, the firebrands were still not placated," Iglesias, wrote. "I got an angry e-mail from Mickey Barnett, an attorney, who, like me, had worked on the Bush-Cheney campaign and who berated me for "appointing a task force to investigate voter fraud instead of bringing charges against suspects.""

In his testimony before the Senate committee, Iglesias said the task force received about 108 complaints of alleged voter fraud through a hotline over the course of about eight weeks.

"Most of the complaints made to the hotline were clearly not prosecutable – citizens would complain of their yard signs being removed from their property and de minimis matters like that," Iglesias testified before the Senate committee. "Only one case of the over 100 referrals had potential. ACORN had employed a woman to register voters. The evidence showed she registered voters who did not have the legal right to vote. The law, 42 USC 1973 had the maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $5000 fine. After personally reviewing the FBI investigative report and speaking to the agent, the prosecutor I had assigned, Mr. [Rumaldo] Armijo, and conferring with [a Justice Department official] I was of the opinion that the case was not provable. I, therefore, did not authorize a prosecution. I have subsequently learned that the State of New Mexico did not file any criminal cases as a result of the" election fraud task force.

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Jason Leopold is Deputy Managing Editor of Truthout.org and the founding editor of the online investigative news magazine The Public Record, http://www.pubrecord.org. He is the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie," a memoir. Visit (more...)
 
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