REAL Voting Fraud: The Strange Case of the Disappearing ACVR, Part One

NPR had a story on Morning Edition today about the mysterious disappearance of the American Center for Voting Rights. The NPR story follows up on stories in Slate magazine and the McClatchy newspapers last month about the center's disappearance.

Here's the deal: The American Center for Voting Rights was founded in the spring of 2005 by some former Bush-Cheney campaign operatives, led by front man was Mark "Thor" Hearne. The Center emerged from the primordial soup a month before a congressional hearing (led by former Congressman, now felon Bob Ney) into electoral irregularities in Ohio. Rather than pursue the voter intimidation and suppression epidemic documented by Robert Kennedy, Jr., the committee keyed off on a report authored by the Center that purported to document widespread voter fraud. And so it went.

In 2005 and 2006, the ACVR was everywhere: testifying in congressional as well as state legislative hearings, issuing so-called "studies" and press releases. Then, sometime in mid- to late 2006, it disappeared. By the time he testified before the Election Assistance Commission in November 2006, Thor was no longer the group's counsel. In early 2007, its website disappeared. The center's disappearance occurred in the same time frame as the firing of nine U.S. Attorneys and the subsequent meltdown of the Attorney General's office. Are they connected?

The Slate article has a good summary of where things stand:

The death of ACVR 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.

Read BradBlog's excellent coverage of the AVCR since it was first established.