“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?"
Iglesias said Bush’s Justice Department issued a directive to all U.S. Attorneys to find and prosecute cases of voter fraud in their states during the hotly contested elections in 2002, 2004 and 2006, even though evidence of such abuses was extremely thin or non-existent.
In his book, In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration, Iglesias said in late summer 2002 he received an e-mail from the Justice Department suggesting "in no uncertain terms" that U.S. Attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials "to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases."
Targeted for Dismissal
When Iglesias faced similar pressure again in 2006 – and refused to bring cases he considered inappropriate – he found himself on a list of U.S. Attorney’s targeted for dismissal.
According to a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, "Patrick Rogers, the former general counsel to the New Mexico state Republican Party and a party activist, continued [before the 2006 election] to complain about voter fraud issues in New Mexico.
"In a March 2006 e-mail forwarded to [Craig] Donsanto in the [Justice Department's] Public Integrity Section, Rogers complained about voter fraud in New Mexico and added, ‘I have calls in, to the USA [U.S. Attorney] and his main assistant, but they were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle last election.”
Donsanto was the author of the updated May 2007 Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses manual that softened the warnings about investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases before an election.
In June 2006, Rogers sent Iglesias's Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Rumaldo Armijo an e-mail:
“The voter fraud wars continue. Any indictment of the Acorn woman would be appreciated. . . . The ACLU/Wortheim [sic] democrats will turn to the camera and suggest fraud is not an issue, because the USA would have done something by now. Carpe Diem!”
John Wertheim was then chairman of the New Mexico Democratic Party.
Iglesias said he now believes GOP claims of voter fraud have been “unique to the Bush administration.”
“If voter fraud is such a problem nationally, why have there only been a handful of prosecutions in the past few years?” he said.
Campaign 2004
The current attacks on ACORN are almost identical to voter fraud allegations raised by Republicans during the final days of Campaign 2004.
In October 2004, Marc Racicot, chairman of the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign, called on Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry to demand that ACORN and other voter registration groups stop engaging in voter registration fraud.
Racicot said these registration efforts would "ultimately paralyze the effective ability of Americans to be able to vote in the next election."
Two weeks before the 2004 presidential election, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett announced the formation of a media campaign to counter what they claimed was voter registration fraud in nine Ohio counties.
“The reports of voter fraud in Ohio are some of the most alarming in the nation,” Gillespie said on Oct. 20, 2004.
Ohio was one of the battleground states in the 2004 election where tens of thousands of voters were purged from the registration rolls and where there were widespread reports that votes intended for Kerry went to Bush.
In Florida, another battleground state in the 2004 presidential election, where President Bush’s brother Jeb was governor, the state’s Department of Law launched a statewide probe into voter registration fraud just two weeks before the presidential election.
A press release issued by the Department of Law cited ACORN, which registered more than 212,000 new voters in the state.
In the two weeks before Election 2004, GOP officials raised similar concerns in Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.
Documents have since surfaced showing how GOP operatives recognized the value of this strategy.
An e-mail, dated Sept. 30, 2004, and sent to a dozen or so staffers on the Bush-Cheney campaign and the RNC, under the subject line "voter reg fraud strategy conference call," describes how campaign staffers planned to challenge the veracity of votes in a handful of battleground states, such as Ohio, in the event of a Democratic victory.
E-mails – among Ohio Republican Party official Michael Magan; Coddy Johnson, then national field director of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign; and Rove associate Timothy Griffin – reveal the men were given documents that could be used as evidence to justify widespread voter challenges if the Bush campaign needed to contest the election results.
Johnson referred to the documents as a "goldmine." The documents were lists of registered voters who did not return address confirmation forms to the Ohio Board of Elections.
Now, four years later, Republicans again seem to believe they can turn the voter fraud issue to their advantage, especially at a time when African-Americans and young people are registering in record numbers – and are viewed as likely to favor Barack Obama.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
