Why? We can only guess but as things look now, the prosecutions would have benefited Domenici’s heir apparent, Cong. Heather Wilson, (R-NM). Seems Heather was in a fix. She’d been accused of sequestering a file that New Mexico Department of Children, Youth and Families had on her husband. There was bad publicity with the implication of nepotism (Wilson was head of the department at the time).
This meant that her tight race was going to be even tighter. Democratic challenger Patricia Madrid had any number of things going for her: a comfortable lead in the polls, the support of a popular governor, and high name recognition. Heather couldn’t count on the same breaks got from the state’s voting machines in 2004. This was a real fight.
Wilson won which by just under 900 votes. This raises some questions. First, what if Iglesias had charged the two Democrats Domenici fingered? Would the Wilson margin have been greater? Second, were there any election irregularities or machine malfunctions worth looking into? That’s a pretty tight margin for a race with over 210 thousand votes. Madrid’s pre election polling alone should have triggered at least a look see. In the late breaking polls, Madrid lead Wilson 53% to 46%. Was there a Wilson surge or could it be…
Heather's happy
There were controversies in New Mexico’s 2004 elections. Greg Palast investigated and found thousands turned away from voting due to restrictive voter identification laws (just the type encouraged by the “voter fraud” prevention program). He also noted:
Last year, I flew to New Mexico to investigate the 33,981 cast but not counted ballots of that state in the 2004 race. George Bush "won" New Mexico by 5,988 votes. Or did he? I calculated that, of the all the ballots rejected and "spoiled," 89% were cast by voters of color. Who won New Mexico? Kerry won--or he would have, if they had counted the ballots.
U.S. Attorney Iglesias didn’t do much prosecuting for “voter fraud” in 2004, nor did he do much election fraud investigating and prosecuting either. Voter fraud occurred at a rate of 24 cases between 2002 and 2006. This type of fraud is an individual act and, in the aggregate, is a non event impacting an immeasurably small fraction of the vote. U.S. Attorney’s, some even trained on vote fraud by Iglesias, spend a lot of time studying this super microscopic fictional crime wave, thus legitimizing it. They spend exactly no time studying and investigating “election fraud,” the theft of hundreds of thousands of votes.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
