As if on cue, after our discussion on voter fraud this past Saturday, an on-going voter fraud case has netted its first arrest. Unfortunately for republicans it was one of their guys. The allegations pretty much follow the tactics and points outlined by Candi on Saturday. You can read about Mark Jacoby’s arrest, and allegations that his firm “slammed” voters (duped them into changing their registered party), here.
This comes on the heals of the McCain campaign’s attempts to link Barack Obama to voter fraud and ACORN when the "fraud" referred to appears to have been done by temporary employees who submitted registration cards in an attempt to increase their pay. Why is this important? Put simply, it fits the Bush administration’s M.O. for pursuing baseless voter fraud cases against democratic party officials on the eve of elections. The goal is to muddy the waters and to link democratic candidates and officials to fraud. It’s a diversionary tactic.
These tactics, it should be noted, were not always prevalent.
As I pointed out on Saturday’s program, the Department of Justice once had a set of guidelines that frowned upon pursuing individual voter fraud allegations right before an election. Common sense tells us all why these guidelines are necessary and good for democracy. Then President Bush came to office.
The Bush administration changed the guidelines and used the Department of Justice to go after democratic office holders. This helps explain why, out of 375 corruption cases carried out by Bush’s Justice Department through August 2007, 79.87% were investigations of Democratic officials. Only 17.87% of the investigations involved republican officials (democrats represent 50% of all elected officials across the country).
When 8 regional U.S. Attorneys didn’t pursue cases vigorously enough – or if they pursued corruption cases against republican candidates too vigorously – they were fired. A Special Prosecutor has been appointed to investigate the firings. Of these cases, perhaps the most widely publicized was the firing of U.S. Attorney from New Mexico David Iglesias, who would not bring voter fraud cases in his district, even after being called by Senator Pete Domenici.
Fortunately, the Obama campaign is on to these tactics. Here’s a letter from Obama’s legal team asking Attorney General Michael Mukasey to expand the authority of the Special Prosecutor appointed to investigate the U.S. Attorney dismissals. Obama’s attorneys want to expand the scope of inquirty to include “a review of any involvement by Justice Department and White House officials in supporting the McCain-Palin campaign” through the dissemination of unsupported voter fraud allegations.
Obama’s legal team is calling it like it is, an “unwarranted and politically motivated intervention in the upcoming election.”
- Mark
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