For a few weeks now, conservative commentators have been attacking the Civil Rights Division for supposedly not vigorously enforcing the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE) of 2009, suggesting that because military voters tend to vote Republican, liberal partisans in the division wouldn't be interested in securing their voting rights. It's not surprising that conservatives would feel this way -- that's exactly how they ran the Civil Rights Division the last time a Republican president was in office, selectively enforcing voting rights laws for partisan benefit.
The conservative argument was that by helping states file waivers asking the feds for help with adhering to the law's requirements, and in some cases possibly extending the deadline to ensure ballots are counted, rather than simply suing the pants off states left and right, the voting section was proving it didn't care about military voters. As Rachel Slajda wrote, conservatives were saying that "the DOJ is trying to undermine the voting rights of overseas troops by helping states figure out how to legally comply with the law."
So the accusation was bogus to begin with, but I doubt this morning's news will placate the section's critics. Yesterday, the voting section, supposedly resistant to intervening on behalf of military voters, filed suit against New York State under the MOVE Act:
Saying that they needed more time to certify the results of the primary and prepare general election ballots, state officials obtained a waiver to move the mailing deadline to Oct. 1. They emphasized that under New York law, any such ballots that arrived within 13 days after the election would be counted, so there would still be a 45-day window.
The federal government granted the waiver. But on Oct. 5, the state disclosed, without explanation, that election boards in several jurisdictions had missed the extended deadline.
The disclosure prompted Justice Department officials to prepare the lawsuit and open negotiations with state officials about how to settle it. The department said it was likely that the eventual consent decree would extend the deadline for when returned ballots must arrive to be counted, such that each would still have had at least 45 days to make the trip.
As a reminder of how the right approaches voting rights, you can look at Illinois Republican Senate Candidate Mark Kirk's forthright admission that his campaign would be targeting black neighborhoods for "voter fraud." The Justice Department under Bush spent 5 years looking for large-scale voter fraud and found absolutely nothing, but the crusade against voter fraud is useful because it serves as a pretext for passing laws that are more likely to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning constituencies.
Again, it's not surprising that Republicans would accuse the administration of suppressing Republican-leaning votes. It's what they would do if they were in power.
