U. S. ATTORNEYS Scandal: 2006 Missouri's election was ground zero for GOP

[BurtWorm]

I was tipped off to this article by Kevin Drum's Political Animal:

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/17168096.htm

By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Accusations about voter fraud seemed to fly from every direction in Missouri before last fall's elections. State and national Republicans leaders fretted that dead people might vote or that some live people might vote more than once.

The threat to the integrity of the election was seen as so grave that Bradley Schlozman, the acting chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and later the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, twice wielded the power of the federal government to try to protect the balloting. The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly also stepped into action.

Now, six months after freshman Missouri Sen. Jim Talent's defeat handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate, disclosures in the wake of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys show that that Republican campaign to protect the balloting was not as it appeared. No significant voter fraud was ever proved.

The preoccupation with ballot fraud in Missouri was part of a wider national effort that critics charge was aimed at protecting the Republican majority in Congress by dampening Democratic turnout. That effort included stiffer voter-identification requirements, wholesale purges of names from lists of registered voters and tight policing of liberal get-out-the-vote drives.

Bush administration officials deny those claims. But they've gotten traction in recent weeks because three of the U.S. attorneys ousted by the Justice Department charge that they lost their jobs because they failed to prove Republican allegations of voter fraud. They say their inquiries found little evidence to support the claims.

Few have endorsed the strategy of pursuing allegations of voter fraud with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove. And nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri....

[BurtWorm]

1. "The real problem has never been vote fraud," said Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo.

"It's access to the polls. In the last 50 years, no one in Missouri has been prosecuted for impersonating someone else at the polls. But thousands of eligible voters have been denied their constitutional rights. . . . It's sickening."

[drm604]

2. Sickening.

That's a very good word for it. It's a good word for just about everything this administration has been doing.

[BurtWorm]

3. "...the Election Day tumult in St. Louis on Nov. 7, 2000" revisited (continuing the article)

It's difficult to capture the emotional debate over the issue of voter fraud in Missouri without considering the Election Day tumult in St. Louis on Nov. 7, 2000. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of voters were turned away because their names weren't on official lists, and many of them converged on the city's election board seeking assistance.

Responding to the bedlam, Democrats won an emergency court order that kept some polls open beyond their scheduled 7 p.m. closings. That outraged Republicans, and Hearne, the Bush campaign lawyer, in turn won an emergency appeals-court ruling that shut the polls within an hour.

In the ensuing days, Bond blamed Ashcroft's defeat on "a criminal enterprise."

The following summer, then-Secretary of State Blunt alleged in a 47-page investigative report that the use of affidavits to allow more than 1,000 "improper ballots . . . compels the conclusion that there was in St. Louis an organized and successful effort to generate improper votes in large numbers."

But an investigation by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, launched before Ashcroft settled in as U.S. attorney general in 2001, found the reverse. In a 2002 court settlement with the department's Voting Rights Section, St. Louis election officials acknowledged that they'd improperly purged some 50,000 names from voter lists before the 2000 elections and had failed as required by federal law to notify those people properly that they'd been placed on inactive status. No one knows how many eligible voters were denied their right to cast ballots.

Missouri's Rep. Clay charged in a recent interview that Blunt's report was an attempt "to violate the voting rights of certain Missourians."

[peacetalksforall]

4. It's another expected attempt to turn crime around. What the

Republican Party is guilty of will be the exact thing they accuse the Democrats of doing. Rovian, Inc. It's in his manual. Flap? Flip! Have a crime flap? Flip it! The entire country was run from and manipulated by Rovian, Inc. Thousands and thousands of citizens particpated in these crimes (called guaranteed tricks to clean thefts in the manual).

[BurtWorm]

5. St. Louis lawyer Mark "Thor" Hearne, national counsel to Bush's 2004 re-election campaign

Separately, Hearne helped establish the nonprofit American Center for Voting Rights in February 2005, which issued lengthy reports alleging voter fraud in states across the country, including Missouri. One director of the supposedly nonpartisan group was Brian Lunde, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee who switched his allegiance in 2000 and headed Democrats for Bush in 2004.

Barnard's Minnite said the center's summary on Missouri consisted of "a litany of overblown allegations of fraud appearing in newspapers, most of which turn out to be minor problems or no problem at all."

Republican state Sen. Delbert Scott of Lowry, Mo., chief sponsor of the photo-ID bill last year, said Hearne had helped draft it and served as a key adviser.

Hearne didn't respond to several requests for comment. His organization closed down its Internet site in March and has disappeared from view.

[catmandu57]

6. Fired up Missouri has been all over this

http://firedupmissouri.com/ it's an interesting situation the fired usa graves is caught up in the motor vehicle scandal here and his cousin our rep is caught up as well, they're like snakes eating each other. The best part about it is none of the fuckers are going to come out clean from this, not any of the graves, not the goddamn governor, none of the fuckups in DC either.

[BurtWorm]

7. Great to hear a MO perspective on it.

Thanks!

[BurtWorm]

8. kick