Justice Department Ran Massive Campaign to Suppress Vote

Today the McClatchy Newspapers publish a major study which unequivocally establishes a large-scale voter suppression program operated by the Department of Justice over the last six years, under both Attorneys General Ashcroft and Gonzales. The project was very carefully focused on battleground states and became successively more intensive as President Bush and the GOP fell from popularity and voter suppression was therefore more urgently needed to retain Republican seats in Congress. Karl Rove’s immediate involvement with the program emerges from several speeches he delivered to Republican Party organizations. According to Joseph Rich, a former chief of the DOJ’s Voting Rights Section, “As more information becomes available about the administration's priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens.” The McClatchy account cites the following specific actions as parts of an overall, integrated campaign:

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Today's Must Read

If there's one good thing that's come out of the U.S. attorneys scandal, it's that it's shining a bright light on the Justice Department. And as a result, it's become clear that the most grossly politicized section of the department is the Civil Rights Division. The reason is plain. As we've seen, many Republicans, and Karl Rove in particular, are obsessed with "voter fraud" -- the idea that minorities in Democratic strongholds are taking advantage of lax record systems to stuff the ballot. There's evidence that at least two of the fired U.S. attorneys were let go because they did not pursue such prosecutions. But the obsession is nothing new; it's one of the defining preoccupations of the Bush administration. The hysterical claims have led Republicans to push voter I.D. laws in several swing states -- efforts that have been backed by the White House.

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