In a massive display of chutzpah, President Bush has asked the Justice Department to look into a request by the local GOP in Ohio to determine whether 200,000 Ohio voters must reconfirm their registration status before Nov. 4. The move comes in response to John Boehner's statement that "there is a significant risk if not a certainty, that unlawful votes will be cast and counted," if the registrations are not re-evaluated. This is nonsense, because first-time voters are required to show federally approved ID at the polls before they are allowed to cast a ballot. Not only that, but the United States Supreme Court already ruled that the local GOP had no standing to bring the complaint in the first place. We already know that these mismatches are due mostly to typos rather than fraudulent applications, and the necessary safeguards against fraudulent voting are already in place.
The move shows how little has changed at the Justice Department since Michael Mukasey took over for Alberto Gonzales. The Bush administration still focuses its attention on nonexistent questions of voter fraud rather than instances of voter suppression like the New Mexico GOP's potential violation of voting rights when it harassed newly registered voters. The Republican Party's agenda in Ohio is similar to its agenda everywhere else: to mitigate Democratic advantages among newly registered voters by ensuring that as few of them are able to vote as possible.
The Bush DOJ was already tainted by the U.S. attorney scandal, in which several U.S. attorneys were fired for failing to bring charges against individuals for voter fraud due to lack of evidence. The specter of "voter fraud" is often raised to disenfranchise voters by typo, and this situation is no different. Americans can no longer expect the government to protect their right to vote; rather, they have to worry about the government doing its best to make that right as hard to exercise as possible, for nakedly partisan reasons.
--A. Serwer
