The Fraudulent Fraud Squad: The incredible, disappearing American Center for Voting Rights.

[BurtWorm]

From Slate.com, with a prominent reference to DU's own Brad Friedman of BradBlog fame ( :applause: ):

http://www.slate.com/id/2166589

By Richard L. Hasen
Posted Friday, May 18, 2007, at 1:41 PM ET


Examining punch-card ballots in Florida in 2000

...


The death of ACVR <American Center for Voting Rights> says a lot about the Republican strategy of raising voter fraud as a crisis in American elections. Presidential adviser Karl Rove and his allies, who have been ghostbusting illusory dead and fictional voters since the contested 2000 election, apparently mounted a two-pronged attack. One part of that attack, at the heart of the current Justice Department scandals, involved getting the DoJ and various U.S. attorneys in battleground states to vigorously prosecute cases of voter fraud. That prong has failed. After exhaustive effort, the Department of Justice discovered virtually no polling-place voter fraud, and its efforts to fire the U.S. attorneys in battleground states who did not push the voter-fraud line enough has backfired. Even if Attorney General Gonzales declines to resign his position, his reputation has been irreparably damaged.

But the second prong of this attack may have proven more successful. This involved using ACVR to give "think tank" academic cachet to the unproven idea that voter fraud is a major problem in elections. That cachet would be used to support the passage of onerous voter-identification laws that depress turnout among the poor, minorities, and the elderly—groups more likely to vote Democratic. Where the Bush administration may have failed to nail illegal voters, the effort to suppress minority voting has borne more fruit, as more states pass these laws, and courts begin to uphold them in the name of beating back waves of largely imaginary voter fraud.

Perhaps even with the demise of ACVR, the hard work—of giving credibility to a nonproblem—is done. The short organizational history of ACVR, chronicled indefatigably by Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog, shows that the group was founded just days before its representatives testified before a congressional committee hearing on election-administration issues chaired by then-Rep. (and now federal inmate) Bob Ney. The group was headed by Hearne, national election counsel to Bush-Cheney '04, and staffed with other Republican operatives, including Jim Dyke, a former RNC communications director....

Consisting of little more than a post-office box and some staffers who wrote reports and gave helpful quotes about the pervasive problems of voter fraud to the press, the group identified Democratic cities as hot spots for voter fraud, then pushed the line that "election integrity" required making it harder for people to vote. The group issued reports (PDF) on areas in the country of special concern, areas that coincidentally tended to be presidential battleground states. In many of these places, it now appears the White House was pressuring U.S. attorneys to bring more voter-fraud prosecutions.

ACVR's method of argument followed a familiar line, first set out by Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund in his book, Stealing Elections. First, ACVR argued extensively by anecdote, pointing to instances of illegal conduct, such as someone, somewhere registering Mary Poppins to vote. Anecdote would then be coupled with statistics showing problems with voter rolls not being purged to remove voters who had died or moved, leaving open the potential for fraudulent voting at the polls. Finally, the group would claim that the amount of such voter fraud is hard to quantify, because it is after all illegal conduct, hidden from the public. Given this great potential for mischief, and without evidence of actual mischief, allegedly reasonable initiatives such as purging voter rolls and requiring ID seemed the natural solution....

[BurtWorm]

1. ACVR's leader has wiped reference to the org from his resume...

According to the first graphs of the OP:



Imagine the National Rifle Association's Web site suddenly disappeared, along with all the data and reports the group had ever posted on gun issues. Imagine Planned Parenthood inexplicably closed its doors one day, without comment from its former leaders. The scenarios are unthinkable, given how established these organizations have become. But even if something did happen to the NRA or Planned Parenthood, no doubt other gun or abortion groups would quickly fill the vacuum and push the ideas they'd pushed for years.

Not so for the American Center for Voting Rights, a group that has literally just disappeared as an organization, and for which it seems no replacement group will rise up. With no notice and little comment, ACVR—the only prominent nongovernmental organization claiming that voter fraud is a major problem, a problem warranting strict rules such as voter-ID laws—simply stopped appearing at government panels and conferences. Its Web domain name has suddenly expired, its reports are all gone (except where they have been preserved by its opponents), and its general counsel, Mark "Thor" Hearne, has cleansed his résumé of affiliation with the group. Hearne won't speak to the press about ACVR's demise. No other group has taken up the "voter fraud" mantra....

[BurtWorm]

2. Another article by Richard Hasen on a similar theme

http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/comments/articles.php?ID=147

Courts Need to Keep a Skeptical Eye on New Voter Identification Laws
Print Page
April 24, 2007
William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola Law School

...Since the 2000 Florida fiasco, there’s been a partisan battle going on in state legislatures to change the rules for administering our elections. Many Democrats have favored reforms that make it easier for people to vote (such as election day registration); Republicans, in contrast, have argued for new voter photo identification laws that they say would prevent fraud at polling places. Democrats contend these laws are likely to disenfranchise a number of legal voters, such as poor voters who can’t afford the documents (such as birth certificates) needed to obtain the ID, or to get transportation to a state office that could issue one.

The debate over these laws took place in an empirical vacuum over how much fraud such ID’s would prevent and over how many legitimate voters would be deterred by identification requirements. Despite the empirical vacuum, laws imposing new voter ID laws have been passed in a number of states---including Georgia, Indiana, and Missouri--basically on party-line votes.

Courts struck down the Georgia and Missouri laws, but all eyes are now on Indiana, where the Seventh Circuit, in an influential opinion by Judge Posner, upheld that state’s voter identification law. Despite the state’s inability to point to a single instance of voter fraud that a voter ID law would help to prevent, Judge Posner said the law could go forward, because it was not a big deal if some voters would lose their right to vote, even assuming, as Posner did, that more Democratic voters would be deterred by the law than Republican voters. (A Democratic-appointed judge dissented, and the Seventh Circuit split virtually on party lines in deciding not to take the case en banc, to be reheard by the entire Seventh Circuit).

Judge Posner said the law could be justified as an anti-fraud measure, and that just because voter fraud is difficult to detect doesn’t mean it’s not there. Though he pointed to the “notorious examples Florida and Illinois, they include Michigan, Missouri, and Washington (state),” he did so without citation and there’s no evidence I am aware of from these states that shows any real problem of the kind of fraud that a voter ID law would prevent: primarily people voting in the name of someone else.

Thanks to the U.S. attorney scandal and the focus on vote fraud, this kind of sloppy reasoning no longer holds water. As recent media reports revealed, despite a concerted 5-year effort by the Justice Department to target instances of voter fraud, the DOJ found almost none of it, certainly no organized effort to use identification fraud to cast illegal ballots. And of those who were prosecuted, many appeared to have made innocent mistakes. Moreover, as a New York Times article revealed, a bipartisan study of voter fraud commissioned by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (and then withheld by the EAC) found virtually no instances of impersonation voter fraud. Another non-partisan study found that voter identification laws suppress turnout, especially among minorities; and this report was disavowed by the EAC (though released under pressure)....

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