Cleta Mitchell is just as the Wall Street Journal has described her—“vocal” in the expression of her views.  For this she is well known within the cottage industry of political lawyers, and she is, in the practice of her craft, highly knowledgeable and experienced.

     But a hard partisan line is a hard partisan line, and it can take, in the thick of competition, a deeply unfortunate turn, such as when Cleta recently chose to be “vocal” about “vote fraud”:

What we’re [Republicans] not for is registering fake people at fake addresses, and creating barriers to trying to identify voter fraud where it exists, which is everywhere.  It’s a growing problem, because of the professional vote-fraud denier industry. 

Now that which is "everywhere" in the observation of Cleta Mitchell has escaped the notice and eluded the documentation of others looking just as hard.  In the same article reporting this comment, election officials, "in Virginia and other states," report that they have not seen this ubiquitous fraud, a fraud that according to Mitchell," is everywhere."

     We know, too, from the photo ID debates that these statutes have been sustained without evidence of fraud "everywhere."  The courts have been presented with no such record, and they have upheld these ID requirements on the mere supposition that fraud could occur—or on the theory, established by the Supreme Court in Purcell, that the mere fear of having their legitimate votes cancelled out by fraudulent ones could deter voters from casting their ballots.

     This is not the portion of the Mitchell manifesto that most catches the reader’s attention.  It is the reference to the "growing problem" of fraud, blamed on the "professional vote-fraud denier industry."  The problem for which no record exists—the problem not noted by the election officials sharing their experience with the Journal—is simply asserted by Mitchell, but asserted to be "growing."  The problem we cannot see has become, invisibly, worse.

     And there is a cause:  "the professional vote-fraud denier industry."  One imagines that Mitchell, a skilled advocate, is picking her words with care, and she presumably understands the connotation of the word "denier."  A "denier," of course, refuses to accept massive, unimpeachable evidence of a grave crime, event or crisis.  The denier is indeed prepared to lie, distort, fabricate and manipulate information to achieve denial.  Cleta imagines that vote fraud "denial" is systematic, professionally executed with the skilled application and the number of practitioners sufficient to make up an "industry." 

     This is a fresh rhetorical tactic in Republican "anti-fraud" politics.  The attack on "fraud" has always suffered from a severe shortage of evidence.  Mitchell solves this problem, after a fashion, by turning the inquiry from the assertion of fraud "everywhere," sorely wanting in factual support, to its "denial."  If widespread fraud is being "denied," by a professional industry that has formed for this purpose, then it is in the nature of "denial" that what is being denied must be true—indisputably true.  And "denial," after all, is neither intellectually nor morally respectable, devoted as it is to the mendacious assault on a known truth.

     Denial, Mitchell says quite explicitly, is no innocent thing, not mere foolishness.  It is complicity in the perpetuation of an evil.  For if vote fraud is "a growing problem," it is so because it has been denied:  "because of the professional vote-fraud denier industry."

     So there it is:

1.   We have scant evidence of fraud.

2.   We know, however, that it is "everywhere."

3.   We know it because it is being "denied," by a professional industry committed to denial.

4.   This denial is causing the problem of fraud to become even worse.

     Cleta Mitchell came up with this formulation after her participation in a panel on fraud sponsored by the National Republican Lawyers Association.  And she seemed to speaking for her colleagues, since she refers to what "we’re all for" and what "we’re not for."  

     This is evidently where her party, or its lawyers, stand on the matter of voting rights, eight years after Republican success in winning the White House, courtesy of Bush v. Gore.  But winning the five votes on the Court in 2000, enough to stop a recount and award an election, will have proven to be easier, far easier, than impeding, with a phony campaign against fraud, the vote of millions in 2008.

     If Cleta, a very good lawyer and normally very realistic, believes otherwise, she is in denial.

Bob Bauer