Justice Department Ran Massive Campaign to Suppress Vote

By Scott Horton

Today the McClatchy Newspapers publish a major study which unequivocally establishes a large-scale voter suppression program operated by the Department of Justice over the last six years, under both Attorneys General Ashcroft and Gonzales. The project was very carefully focused on battleground states and became successively more intensive as President Bush and the GOP fell from popularity and voter suppression was therefore more urgently needed to retain Republican seats in Congress. Karl Rove’s immediate involvement with the program emerges from several speeches he delivered to Republican Party organizations.

According to Joseph Rich, a former chief of the DOJ’s Voting Rights Section, “As more information becomes available about the administration's priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens.” The McClatchy account cites the following specific actions as parts of an overall, integrated campaign:

• Approved Georgia and Arizona laws that tightened voter ID requirements. A federal judge tossed out the Georgia law as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of poor voters, and a federal appeals court signaled its objections to the Arizona law on similar grounds last fall, but that litigation was delayed by the U.S. Supreme Court until after the election.
• Issued advisory opinions that overstated a 2002 federal election law by asserting that it required states to disqualify new voting registrants if their identification didn't match that in computer databases, prompting at least three states to reject tens of thousands of applicants mistakenly.
• Done little to enforce a provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act that requires state public assistance agencies to register voters. The inaction has contributed to a 50 percent decline in annual registrations at those agencies, to 1 million from 2 million.
• Sued at least six states on grounds that they had too many people on their voter rolls. Some eligible voters were removed in the resulting purges.

Historically, the Justice Department has been an advocate of voter’s rights, working for decades to overturn Jim Crow legislation and practices that denied access to the polls to minority groups. This study shows that under Alberto Gonzales, those practices were reversed, and the Department instead began advocating typical Jim Crow legislation that it had historically opposed. The constituencies targeted are tied together by a single common thread: a tendency to support Democratic candidates.