Also published at my web magazine, The Public Record.
The Justice Department issued a directive to every US attorney in the country to find and prosecute cases of voter fraud during the height of hotly contested elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006, even though evidence of such abuses was extremely thin or non-existent, according to a former federal prosecutor.
David Iglesias, the former US attorney for New Mexico, recalled receiving an email in late summer 2002 from the Department of Justice suggesting "in no uncertain terms" that US attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials "to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases," Iglesias wrote in his recently published memoir, In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a grassroots group that has registered hundreds of thousands of new voters, was one of the Justice Department’s targets. In recent weeks, ACORN has become the target of Republican attacks over claims the organization is involved in a nationwide voter registration fraud scheme.
Trying to salvage his campaign, John McCain last week declared ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."
In his book, Iglesias recounted how the Department of Justice aggressively pushed him and other US attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, an issue the former US attorney says the DOJ became unusually obsessed with.
"The e-mail imperatives came again in 2004 and 2006, by which time I had learned that far from being standard operating procedure for the Justice Department, the emphasis on voter irregularities was unique to the Bush administration," Iglesias wrote.
Iglesias says that Republican officials in his state were far less interested in election reforms and more intent on suppressing votes.
"But there was a more sinister reading to such urgent calls for reform, not to mention the Justice Department's strident insistence on harvesting a bumper crop of voter fraud prosecutions.”
"Not only did the [Bush] administration stoop to such seamy expedients to press its agenda in 2004," Iglesias wrote. "It had the full might and authority of the federal government and its prosecutorial powers to accomplish its ends."
Last week, New Mexico Republican officials continued to press claims of voter fraud in the state.
The New Mexico Republican Party publicly announced the identity of 28 people suspected of casting fraudulent votes in the June Democratic primary. State Republican Party officials claimed the ballots in question had inaccurate social security numbers and wrong birth dates.
In a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey Monday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers criticized the New Mexico GOP for disseminating the names of the voters claiming "it was a clear effort to intimidate voters."
The state’s Republican Party claims it discovered the problems during a review of 92 newly registered voters in one district.
Pat Rogers, an attorney who works closely with the state's Republican Party, said the suspect ballots were turned over to the state attorney general's office and the Bernalillo County district attorney.
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