A Fraudulent Report on Voter Fraud

By Scott Horton

The New York Times gives us a report today on a federal panel's study of voter fraud.

A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by The New York Times.

Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate.

Voter fraud, it turns out, is just like global warming. It doesn't matter what the scientific community thinks. Their views can be always be swept under the carpet by saying the matter is “unsettled.”

Though the original report said that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud,” the final version of the report released to the public concluded in its executive summary that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.”

But the flip side of this issue is what the Republican initiative is all about: voter suppression. When GOP functionaries talk about “voter fraud,” note that in their universe it only occurs in places where the voters are likely to be Democrats by large margins. The target communities are typically inner city blacks, native Americans on reservations in South Dakota and New Mexico or Hispanics in the southwest, for instance. So, what is the effect of running a “voter fraud” operation and going exclusively after these minority constituencies? The answer is obvious, and the original report discussed that, too.

The original report on fraud cites “evidence of some continued outright intimidation and suppression” of voters by local officials, especially in some American Indian communities, while the final report says only that voter “intimidation is also a topic of some debate because there is little agreement concerning what constitutes actionable voter intimidation.”

The original report said most experts believe that “false registration forms have not resulted in polling place fraud,” but the final report cites “registration drives by nongovernmental groups as a source of fraud.”

So, transposing this to the global warming paradigm, it is as if the original report said that global warming can be linked to human conduct, and particularly the increased emission from the use of hydrocarbons, and the “retouched” version says that scientists are still unclear that there is global warming, but it may well be linked to dinosaur flatulence. Truthiness prevails. Karl Rove has worked his magic.

As George Orwell writes, “Those who control the past, control the future; Those who control the future, control the present; Those who control the present, control the past.” Karl Rove lives and breathes this Orwellian premise. The question is how long he can get away with it.