Prior to the Bush administration, there had not been a unit in the voting section specifically set up to pursue claims of voter fraud, the Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative. That's because, statistically speaking, the casting of an actual fraudulent ballot is an extremely rare phenomenon, the only thing rarer is doing so deliberately. The Bush administration's pursuit of voter fraud led to a handful of prosecutions, none of which involved a large-scale scheme to swing a federal election.
Nonetheless, under fire from conservatives over the New Black Panther voter-intimidation case, the Justice Department has kept the "Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative," and as TPM's Ryan J. Reilly reports, has promised to aggressively prosecute instances of voter fraud. Reilly interviewed Civil Rights Division Head Thomas Perez, who says:
"We enforce both voter intimidation laws and voter fraud laws and we will continue to do so as we have done: carefully, aggressively, and evenhandedly," Perez said in response to a question from TPMMuckraker. "It is impossible to provide a road map for what constitutes such a case because they're very much fact-driven. We have criminal statutes related to intimidation, we have civil statutes pertaining to voter intimidation, we have criminal statutes related to fraud."
There's nothing objectionable about this statement. If someone did deliberately try to swing an election through voter fraud, that would be a crime and should be prosecuted. The problem with the prior administration was that "voter fraud" served as a pretext for disenfranchising minority voters, as it has since Reconstruction, although of course back then it was Democrats beating the voter-fraud drum. Perez is signaling that the new administration will not be as selective in its enforcement of voting-rights laws as the last administration was.
The problem is that Perez' statement suggests voter fraud and voter intimidation are equally serious problems. While the kind of egregious instances of voter intimidation that characterized voting in the past are indeed rare, voters being disenfranchised by systemic actions taken under the pretense of preventing voter fraud are common and affect large numbers of people. While the Civil Rights Division may have avoided a predictable firestorm by retaining the Bush-era initiative, they're also inadvertently granting legitimacy to the wild claims of pervasive voter fraud being made by conspiracy-minded Republicans by suggesting it's a serious enough problem that that the initiative is worth keeping.
