Various and different threads have become tangled together in the reports on the Administration’s search and destroy mission launched against voter fraud.  There are suggestions of a mismanaged and misconceived relationship with US Attorneys.  Questions have been raised, with justification, about the truthfulness of the Administration’s account of its actions.  And there is the subplot, operating here as an organizing principle, of the preoccupation with pursuing voter fraud—an initiative that, according to the New York Times today, appears to have been marked by ineffectiveness and overkill.   Eric Lipton and Ian Urbina, "In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud,"  New York Times (Apr. 12, 2007).  Moreover, even within this election law subplot, there are related but distinguishable story-lines:  individual prosecutions of voter fraud, but also the restructuring of Voting Rights policy and administration. 

     Keeping all these separate, hard as it may be, remains fairly pressing, if only in the interests of judging what in the way of a constructive response is needed.  The Times story, importantly, suggests that events outside of Washington, in the conduct of "voter fraud" prosecutions, deserve close, perhaps even the closest, attention.  But for the ruckus in Washington, they would have received hardly any at all.  Yet according to the Times, the Administration was cobbling to together two-bit cases, winning precious few, and achieving in the successful cases the imprisonment or deportation of people whose  mistakes and misconduct hardly put the integrity of the electoral system at risk.

      The Times suggests that the prosecutions were targeted at low-income or minority communities, not coincidentally associated with voting patterns more favorable to one party than to another.  On the emerging but still incomplete record, it is reasonable to believe that, under pressure from Washington, some investigations, and if possible some convictions, were needed to put quantitative weight behind the Administration's proclaimed "anti-fraud" program, announced with fanfare by former Attorney General Ashcroft.  This was a bureaucratic imperative but also a political one, essential to building the case for other policy focused initiatives, such as the effort to build the case for voter identification statutes.  It was politically useful in another sense, in "sending a message" to those communities and those organizing within them that the Government was watching and ready to strike.

     In all this, the types, patterns and disposition of prosecutions would, as they did, receive the least attention.  There might be some word of them in local press, more on the convictions if any at all on the acquittals.  The costs of the Administration’s efforts on this front, at this level, would surely never have wound up so prominently featured in the New York Times if it the larger political war over Gonzalez’s tenure at the Department of Justice had not broken out.  What is happening at the state level, in state law enforcement efforts, remains largely obscured from view, neither documented by publicly available, state-collected data nor collected routinely by news organizations.

     And yet information about government pursuit of voter fraud—about the investigation and prosecution of individual voters and those who organize and seek to motivate them—should not depend on a moment of political scandal for sufficient volume, reliability or availability.  An Administration and the states should have to account regularly and in detail for these kinds of prosecutorial judgments.  The data, in the aggregate and more specifically, should be open to anyone who chooses to inquire. 

     This is a point stressed by Professor Lorraine Minnite, in an excellent report on The Politics of Voter Fraud, produced for Project Vote:

There are no reliable, officially compiled, national or even statewide statistics on voter fraud.  Even though many criminal acts associated with ‘voter fraud’ are classified as felonies, voter fraud fails to appear in the F.B.I.’s uniform crime reports.  There are no publicly available criminal justice databases that include voter fraud as a category of crime. No states collect and public statistics on voter fraud.

Politics of Voter Fraud at 9.

     The first of Minnite’s recommendations is that state election agencies "should collect and maintain data on fraud allegations and enforcement activities and routinely report this information to the public."  Id. at 36.

     The politics of the campaign against "voter fraud" thrives on the absence of information, which is in this context is an absence of accountability and the ample opportunity for abuse.  In a reform era, when government habitually entertains proposals to impose new disclosure requirements on its citizenry, the citizens are entitled to demand disclosure from its government.  This is all the more necessary when the government sets as one of its goals the investigation of the franchise, the most direct mechanism by which citizens remain in control—and not in the control—of the state.

Bob Bauer