Iglesias, Voter Fraud, and Canning Attorneys Scandal

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John Boyd, an Albuquerque, New Mexico, based elections attorney who worked with the Democratic party in the state during the 2004 election, sends us the following inside account of the scandal surrounding recent reports that purged NM U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was removed for his unwillingness to prosecute claims of "voter fraud" in the state prior to the 2004 Presidential Election.

Before the election, Boyd helped represent the Dems in defending against the scurrilous GOP "voter fraud fraud," as he calls it. After the election, he successfully filed suit, along with the watchdog organization VoterAction.org, against the state concerning failures in their DRE/touch-screen voting system. That suit eventually led to a statewide ban on such systems and a requirement for paper-based elections.

Boyd writes that the firing scandal is actually "far worse than it now appears." His harrowing, first-hand account and reasons for that claim, as sent to us this morning, details how the GOP manufactured their pre-election "voter fraud" crisis in the state, despite lacking any evidence of any actual crimes.

His first-hand description of the events follows in full...

THE FIRED U.S. ATTORNEY, DAVID IGLESIAS, AND “VOTER FRAUD”

In order to blunt the scandal arising from the Republican efforts to persuade U.S. Attorney David Iglesias (New Mexico) to indict some Democrats just before the last election, Senator Pete Domenici and other Republicans have explained that, really, they’ve been “disappointed” with Iglesias for some time. Why? Because, according to Domenici et al., Iglesias failed to aggressively pursue the problem of “voter fraud” in New Mexico. These Republicans are undoubtedly telling the truth about this. The problem for them is that this explanation doesn’t make things better for them, it makes things far, far worse. Read on.

In the run-up to the 2004 election, there were intense efforts at voter registration going on in New Mexico. The result was the enfranchisement of many minorities and poor. The Republicans were apoplectic, of course. The registration campaigns added about 65,000 voters to the rolls in Bernalillo County alone, about a 10% increase.

The Republicans’ response (and it has since been surfacing in Congress as well as in other states) was to demand strict “voter i.d.” laws. Strict voter i.d. laws have the effect of disenfranchising many students (who may not have in-state licenses, or other forms of i.d. showing an address), old people, minorities and poor who for many reasons may not possess the type of identification such a law would require.

The Republicans have been trying to sell these laws for the last two or three years, but they have needed a “hook”. The hook is what they refer to as “voter fraud.” If they can persuade the public that people are voting twice, or that people who shouldn’t be permitted to vote are voting, or that other kinds of “fraud” are occurring, they can sell “voter i.d.” as the solution. The problem for the Republicans is that voter fraud is not even a tiny problem. There are not a lot of people who are prepared to risk a felony conviction by finagling a way to vote twice, and there are not a lot of illegal aliens trying to figure out how to vote in American elections. As I learned from a Harvard professor who has studied the history of voting in America, the banner of “voter fraud” has a long and ugly history because it has been repeatedly used to justify impediments to voting, from poll taxes and literacy tests to the present day push for strict “voter i.d.” laws.

So in New Mexico, in the late summer of 2004, a group of Republicans marched into the county clerk’s office and asked if there were any “problem” registrations associated with the voter registration drives. The clerk said “yes” and told them that there were some 6000 defectively completed registration forms (missing ss#’s, po box addresses, no signature, that sort of thing).

The problem for the Republicans, however, was that these didn’t represent fraud, they were just typical and expected screw-ups by the registrants or the people registering them.

The Republicans nevertheless held a press conference, and grabbed headlines, announcing how terribly shocked they were to report that there were over 6000 “fraudulent registrations” submitted by these nefarious voter registration groups, and New Mexico’s voter rolls were being grossly corrupted. This had the predictable effect on the public, whose response was that they could now understand why a strict voter i.d. law would be a good idea.

The Republicans filed suit to try to get a state district court declaration that New Mexico’s very narrow voter i.d. statute (which applied only to first-time voters who had mailed in their voter registration applications) should have a much broader interpretation, under which most new voters would have to present i.d. at the polls. I represented the Democratic Party as an intervenor in the suit. More on the story.