Parties wage war over voter fraud, intimidation

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the senior African-American member of Congress, said, “It’s pretty clear. You’ve got a black candidate for president for the first time. Do you think that the usual attempts to suppress voting among minorities are going to go down and not up? Of course not.”

Furor over fired federal prosecutors
Democrats charge that the Bush administration went to extraordinary and perhaps illegal lengths to pursue voter fraud allegations.

Last month, a report from the Justice Department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility found that former attorney general Alberto Gonzales fired the United States attorney in New Mexico, David Iglesias, in December of 2006 after top Republicans in the state complained that Iglesias hadn’t aggressively pursued voter-fraud cases after the 2004 election.

It was the ACORN issue that partly led to Iglesias being fired.

Patrick Rogers, a New Mexico Republican activist, complained in a March 2006 e-mail to a Justice Department official that Iglesias and his assistant "were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle" in the 2004 election when the group was accused of submitting fraudulent registrations in the state.

That same motive — insufficient zeal in prosecuting alleged vote fraud — may have played a role in the firing of the United States attorney in Seattle, John McKay.

But Republicans say the U.S. attorneys controversy doesn’t undercut their fundamental contention: Voter fraud has occurred and may occur again this year.

While Republicans accuse Democrats of benefiting from voter fraud, Democrats fire back that Republicans are trying to suppress the Democratic vote by too stringent rules on voter identification.

Photo ID requirement 'an abomination'?
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said a Georgia law that required residents to show photo identification when voting in person was “an abomination.”

In Georgia, Schumer’s DSCC is backing Democrat Jim Martin’s challenge to Republican incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss as the Democrats aim for a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority.

“Photo ID laws in other states, which we don’t have, are barriers to senior citizens voting,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat. “There’s no support for that idea among election officials and people in Minnesota…. I think generally it is agreed that photo ID laws are designed to prevent some people from voting whether it’s senior citizens or others.”

But Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, a Republican, defended his state’s photo ID requirement. “The law was very narrowly crafted and well tailored,” Rokita said.

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The law was upheld in a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court last January. “Not only is the risk of voter fraud real,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens in the majority opinion, but “it could affect the outcome of a close election.”

Under Indiana law, a person without a photo ID can cast a provisional ballot, and then has up to ten days after Election Day to get a free state-issued photo ID from a local office of the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

Caught in the middle of the partisan warfare over voting are the local officials who in just three weeks will have the job of administering elections across the nation.

“We are at the point where we have had so many allegations made about the process, that I'm not sure we're not doing permanent damage to the process,” Lewis testified last month. “We've got to get to the point where we understand the process is more important than partisanship.”

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