I guess one just never knows where things will lead. Apparently, this voter fraud business is just that – a business. Like the Niger Yellowcake story, it’s hard to follow, in part, because it’s hard to imagine that adults would act this way. Apparently, there’s a Rove driven voter fraud initiative that’s prevaded the Justice Department actually designed to intimidate voters from registering of voting. I’m not a reader of The Brad Blog, in part because I have trouble following what it’s saying – it’s written to people who follow these issues closely and know the players. But this entry from last October is pretty clear. It concerns "Thor" Hearne, a St. Louis lawyer who was the Bush/Cheney 04 lawyer, a friend of Karl Rove, and is a self proclaimed voter fraud expert:
The EAC’s Buried Report on ‘Voter Fraud’ — or Actually Lack Thereof — and ‘Thor’ Hearne’s Continuing Loathesome Attempts to Destroy American Democracy
Following up on our Wednesday coverage of the four- month-old report on "Voter Fraud," which the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) refused to release when they discovered the report points to just how little such fraud actually occurs. The facts don’t lie, despite the loathesome high-level GOP/Team Bush operatives who call themselves the "non-partisan" American Center for Voting Rights’ (ACVR), and their ongoing disingenuous and well-funded efforts to establish that voter fraud is rampant, perpetrated almost exclusively by Democrats, and must be cured by disenfranchising and unconstitutional Photo ID requirement laws at the polls (although not for absentee or military balloting, of course).
We’ve now had a chance to review the unreleased report [PDF] in full. It’s just twelve pages. But it slams the notion that there is any massive problem in America with "Voter Fraud", despite ACVR’s continuing campaign to suggest the problem is an epidemic — versus all of the many other forms of disenfranchisement that really do occur and really do threaten our democracy.
"There is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud," the report explains, "or at least much less than is claimed, including voter impersonation, ‘dead’ voters, noncitizens voting and felon voters."
Apparently, this ACVR came into being just to attend this Conference and lobby for the high incidence of voter fraud. From the report:
So, the report didn’t support the supposed incidence of voter fraud, so it wasn’t released? Now there’s a suggestion that Bud Cummins from Arkansas, one of the fired Attorneys, may have been fired for investigating a client of "Thor" Hearne. This is a tangle too dense for this time of night. I guess I’ll put it on the list of coming attractions. But the gist of things is that the voter fraud campaign may be nastier than anyone has yet imagined. Is "Thor" Hearn another Segretti? We’ll see…
[…] to me that this has been a standard procedure for longer than we’ve known. Remember this? It was a Conference to look into voter fraud two years ago. There wasn’t any evidence that […]