How U.S. attorneys were used to spread voter-fraud fears

Missouri's photo ID law was struck down by the state Supreme Court in October 2006, just before the midterm elections. But by then, the Bush administration had used a loophole in the Patriot Act to appoint Bradley Schlozman, who had supervised the voting section of the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ at headquarters in Washington, as Graves' successor in the Western District. The loophole was closed by a vote of the Senate on Tuesday, but in March of 2006 Alberto Gonzales was able to make Schlozman a U.S. attorney without seeking confirmation from the Senate.

The appointment, the first under the controversial Patriot Act provision, raised eyebrows at DOJ, one former senior Justice Department official told Salon. "Schlozman was one of Gonzales' guys," the former senior official said, "but several of us were scratching our heads when we heard about it because he was not a very well-regarded trial attorney."

Schlozman, who graduated from law school in 1996, was a clerk for three years and an appellate attorney in Washington for two years before joining the Department of Justice. He certainly had less experience (PDF) as a criminal prosecutor than many of his fellow U.S. attorneys. But as the head of the voting section of the DOJ's civil right division, he knew a lot about election fraud. In 2005, he had penned an editorial for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution supporting a bill passed by the Republican-dominated Georgia state Legislature requiring voters to show photo ID. Schlozman argued that the bill would not be an impediment to minority voters.

Less than a week before the 2006 midterm election, in which Missouri was the scene of one of the year's tightest Senate contests, Schlozman announced the indictment of four people for voter fraud. The four had allegedly submitted false voter registrations while working for the group ACORN in the inner city of Kansas City. An organization that conducts registration drives in poor and minority urban neighborhoods, i.e., areas of Democratic strength, ACORN has often been a target of fraud accusations by the right. "This national investigation is very much ongoing," said Schlozman in a statement issued Nov. 1. The indictments were trumpeted by myriad conservative blogs and such national outlets as Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times.

More than four months after he announced them -- and after incumbent Republican Sen. Jim Talent lost a close election to Democrat Claire McCaskill -- Schlozman's four indictments have produced one guilty plea. An indictment against a fifth person was dropped. In the wake of the U.S. attorneys scandal, meanwhile, Schlozman is suddenly on his way out. On Jan. 16, two days before he gave his annual testimony to Congress, during which Democrats questioned him about the mass firing of U.S. attorneys, Attorney General Gonzales announced that John Wood would be taking Schlozman's place in Kansas City. "Schlozman had [only] been there for 10 months," the former senior Justice Department official told Salon. Until the firings became an issue, "They weren't going to replace him."

Political considerations aside, are the types of prosecutions pursued by Schlozman and his peers valid? Is real fraud actually common? As Bud Cummins, one of the eight U.S. attorneys just fired by the Bush administration, tells Salon, cases involving registration drives by groups like ACORN do crop up. But Cummins notes that when there is fraud connected to groups like ACORN, it is often perpetrated upon them, not by them. The groups sometimes pay workers by the number of registrations they turn in, which can lead some of the workers to falsify registrations to earn more money. Others, paid by the hour, falsify registrations so they can appear to have logged extra time.

The "voters" whose names wind up on the phony registrations are usually oblivious. "Those people that are registered in those ways either don't exist or don't know they're registered," said Cummins, who was U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. He also notes that most of these fraudulent registrations will never be used to vote. He provided one example of a case he investigated, in which a registration worker had simply used a phone book to pick out names at random. "You'd see something like Bud Smith, then Kate Smith," he recalled, "and then there was Smith Auto Body."

More generally, there seems to be little statistical basis for the Republican fixation on voter fraud. The few studies that have been done show fraud to be insignificant to the outcome of elections; it has been measured at levels as low as .0004 percent (PDF) of all ballots cast. Loraine Minnite, an assistant professor of political science at Barnard College, conducted a study of elections from 1992 to 2002 for Demos, a London- and New York-based public-policy think tank. Her analysis of the numbers showed that "the incidence of election fraud in the United States is low and that fraud has had a minimal impact on electoral outcomes." A 2006 report from the United States Election Assistance Commission, an independent agency created by Congress to "[conduct] research on election administration issues," calls Minnite's study the "most systematic look at fraud" (PDF).

The problem with the data cited by Minnite and other researchers is that it only counts people who were caught. And for people who believe that voter fraud is widespread, meaning Republicans, the other problem is the source. Numeric research on voter fraud tends to be conducted by and for people who don't believe it's widespread, meaning liberals. Demos, the think tank for which Minnite conducted her study, is progressive. Minnite also just wrote a new paper debunking voter fraud for Project Vote -- a group affiliated with ACORN. Despite a federal agency's endorsement, don't expect Republicans to read and heed Minnite's "systematic study" or to believe anyone else who suggests voter fraud is less than rampant. In fact, the USEAC report that includes an endorsement of Minnite's study was initially withheld. The USEAC delayed releasing it, according to the agency's chairman, a Bush appointee, because of "a division of opinion." The report had failed to give much credence to the issue of voter fraud.

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