That anonymous mailer followed a spate of public attacks, ads, and mailers by the Goolsby campaign -- and even a letter to the local district attorney by the county Republican chairman -- all accusing Miller of engaging in voter fraud during her first campaign against Goolsby in 2004. The Republican smears, now the subject of a pending defamation lawsuit aimed at Goolsby and other local Republicans, also claimed she had illegally "retained the services of ACORN," while tarring the organization with flimsy claims that it deliberately engaged in voter fraud.
The district attorney never responded to the Dallas GOP's allegations, but the local CBS affiliate, CBS 11 News, jumped on the story to ballyhoo the bogus charges filed by Republican County Chairman Kenn George with the D.A.The real fraud involved George's inflammatory letter to the prosecutor, which blatantly misrepresented election returns from 2004 in order to file the false voter fraud complaint against Miller. The letter claimed that as a Democrat running for a state House seat, she suspiciously won more votes than the Democratic candidate for Congress in black districts, when, in fact, there was no Democratic congressional candidate opposing the Republican, just an obscure independent.
Corruption and Politicization at the Department of Justice
In the wake of the scandal opened up with inquiries into the firing of David Iglesias, which eventually cost Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez his job, the full scale of the politicization and corruption at the Department of Justice came into view.
Congressional oversight hearings examined the Department's role in voter suppression activities, including allegations of voter fraud, voter caging, and voter intimidation. Representative John Conyers, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has tackled the voter caging issue and has started hearings on this and related issues through his Committee and its various sub-committees.
Hearings held recently in front of one of those House Judiciary subcommittees revealed how the Department, through the Federal Bureau of Investigation, "failed to investigate illegal mailers sent to African-Americans in Dallas" that threatened criminal punishments if they registered to vote through ACORN in the run-up to a 2006 Congressional election, Levine wrote.
"The FBI's decision not to investigate, critics say, is the latest sign that politicization appears to have compromised the nominally non-partisan law enforcement agency," Levine wrote. "That intimidation is a violation of the Voting Rights Act," said "former 21-year veteran of the Civil Rights Division" and election law expert, Gerry Hebert. Levine further notes that "President Bush's Justice Department hasn't brought a single prosecution or lawsuit in more than seven years on behalf of any African-American voters who faced direct voter intimidation threats and challenges - despite receiving, by some estimates, roughly 12,000 criminal civil rights complaints of all kinds annually." But the VRA is not the only federal law the Department failed to enforce as partisan political operatives such as Hans von Spakovsky took over key parts of the Department's voting rights enforcement apparatus.
"Meanwhile, the Justice Department's Voting Section has not enforced other federal laws, such as the requirement that state welfare offices offer public aid recipients a chance to register to vote," wrote Steve Rosenfeld in the Fall 2007 issue of Social Policy, referring to Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act. Instead, the Department has had a heavy hand at pushing detrimental voter purges, a procedure loosely mandated by another NVRA section. At a House hearing on equal enforcement of NVRA Tuesday, Project Vote deputy director, Michael Slater testified that "All Americans deserve an equal opportunity to register to vote and participate in our democracy...Many states, however, are undermining that promise and furthering inequalities."
Levine recounted the number of voters disenfranchised as a result of these purges and voter caging policies:
"In Ohio in 2006, 303,000 voters were purged in three major urban counties, while the Brennan Center reported that Pennsylvania's rigid database rules, later loosened, had excluded up to 30 percent of eligible registrants. Karl Rove aide Tim Griffin played a major role in state GOP voter 'caging' operations (that is, challenging the eligibility of registered voters) in such states as Ohio and Florida. These schemes, Project Vote reports, challenged the right of 77,000 mostly minority voters to cast ballots between 2004 and 2006, under the pretext that non-forwardable letters sent by GOP activists to their addresses were returned as undelivered."
The Myth of Voter Fraud and Voter Disenfranchisement Through Voter ID Laws
The Department has been complicit in partisan accusations of widespread voter fraud used as a pretext to legalize voter suppression tactics, especially voter identification laws. "Yet voter fraud, in fact, is so rare that even an intensive, four-year anti-fraud initiative by the Justice Department couldn't even find one person in the country to charge with impersonating another voter - out of nearly 215 million votes cast in federal elections," Levine wrote in the Huffington Post.
Despite this lack of evidence, hysterical accusations of "voter fraud" inspired nearly 30 states to consider bills requiring photo identification or proof of citizenship requirements since 2004. The Department of Justice, again through the machinations of von Spakovsky, approved one of the worst instances of these laws in Georgia, which was subsequently overturned by the courts. A slightly less draconian version of the law is now in effect. However, the worst version of these laws went into effect in Indiana, where it was promptly challenged. Upheld by a Federal appeals court, the law is now under review by the U.S. Supreme Court, which seems to be considering dubious claims of voter fraud as reason enough to keep the law on the books.
"Alarmingly, the insubstantiality of the claims of pervasive voter fraud may not deter the U.S. Supreme Court from upholding Indiana's restrictive voter-ID law -- which, according to a new University of Washington study, could disenfranchise the more than 20 percent of the state's African American voters who lack the ID required by Indiana's law," Levine wrote.
The most alarming aspect of this possible decision is its ability to affect turnout in 2008. "Democrats seemingly haven't yet grasped the political importance of fighting these restrictive policies, though they could prove a major impediment to minority voting...," concludes Levine.
Action on Election Day Is Too Late
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