Today’s seventh annual conference on Ballot Access and Voting Integrity is intended by its founder Attorney General John Ashcroft to train US Attorneys about the perils of individual voters, mostly Democrats and minorities, cheating at the ballot box. The past six conferences have reflected the Justice Department’s shift from protecting voting rights to prosecuting supposed “voting fraud.”
“Attorney General Michael Mukasey has an opportunity today to refute the perversion of his agency’s mission” said Brett Bursey, Director of the SC Progressive Network, which work on voting rights. “Under the Bush Administration, the focus of the Justice Department has been a punitive effort against supposed voter fraud, as opposed to the historical role of the department to insure voter access to the polls.”
A recent study by the Brennan Center of the NY School of Law found that individual voter fraud (the type the Justice Department is focusing on) is “less likely than being struck by lightning while waiting in line to vote.” The Director of the SC Election Commission recently told a State House Judiciary subcommittee hearing a bill that would require additional ID to register to vote that she did not know of a single case of individual voter fraud in South Carolina.
Bursey reported a clear case of voter suppression to the Voting Section during the 2004 election. “I got the guy on the phone who had approved the Section 5 move of a precinct in Beaufort County from a fire station to a gated community. Voters had to go past a private security guard to get to the polling place. If your name wasn’t on the precinct list, they wouldn’t let you in, which violated the statute that lets one vote a provisional ballot. They don’t allow pedestrians, so you had to have a car to vote. The Section 5 attorney told me he wouldn’t have approved moving the precinct if he knew it was a gated community. I asked him if he would put that in writing so I could advise County Election Directors not to locate polling places in gated communities and he refused. I was later told by former Voting Section staff Dr. Toby Moore that the remaining staff was afraid to do anything that might anger their partisan bosses.”
More than half of the career employees of the Voting Rights Section of the Justice Department have resigned since 2005, citing ethical conflicts arising from the politicization of their jobs. Moore, who resigned from the Section in 2006, told a US House Judiciary Subcommittee last October, “Until someone in the Department, in this administration or the next, admits to the mistakes of the past several years and restores credible leadership, the Voting Section of Civil Rights Division will remain a wounded institution. That ultimately harms not only employees of the Voting Section and minority voters, but all Americans.”
“The Justice Department’s focus on ‘voting integrity’ has been exposed as a partisan effort to suppress Democratic votes,” Bursey said, “and we are looking to Attorney General Mukasey to put a stop to it.”