New Yorker article on Ashcroft and voting issues

[Cocoa]

I had no idea John was so involved with election stuff...

Is the Justice Department poised to stop voter fraud-or to keep voters from voting?


http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040920fa_fact

<snip>

On October 8, 2002, Attorney General Ashcroft stood before an invited audience in the Great Hall of the Justice Department to outline his vision of voting rights, in words that owed much to the rhetoric used by L.B.J. and Lincoln. “The right of citizens to vote and have their vote count is the cornerstone of our democracy-the necessary precondition of government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” Ashcroft told the group, which included several veteran civil-rights lawyers.

The Attorney General had come forward to launch the Voting Access and Integrity Initiative, whose name refers to the two main traditions in voting-rights law. Voter-access efforts, which have long been associated with Democrats, seek to remove barriers that discourage poor and minority voters; the Voting Rights Act itself is the paradigmatic voter-access policy. The voting-integrity movement, which has traditionally been favored by Republicans, targets fraud in the voting process, from voter registration to voting and ballot counting. Despite the title, Ashcroft’s proposal favored the “integrity” side of the ledger, mainly by assigning a federal prosecutor to watch for election crimes in each judicial district. These lawyers, Ashcroft said, would “deter and detect discrimination, prevent electoral corruption, and bring violators to justice.”

Federal law gives the Justice Department the flexibility to focus on either voter access or voting integrity under the broad heading of voting rights, but such shifts of emphasis may have a profound impact on how votes are cast and counted. In the abstract, no one questions the goal of eliminating voting fraud, but the idea of involving federal prosecutors in election supervision troubles many civil-rights advocates, because few assistant United States attorneys have much familiarity with the laws protecting voter access. That has traditionally been the province of the lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, whose role is defined by the Voting Rights Act. In a subtle way, the Ashcroft initiative nudged some of these career civil-rights lawyers toward the sidelines.

Addressing the real but uncertain dimensions of voter fraud means risking potentially greater harm to legitimate voters. “There is no doubt that there has been fraud over the years-people voting twice, immigrants voting, unregistered people voting-but no one knows how bad the problem is,” Lowenstein says. “It is a very hard subject for an academic or anyone else to study, because by definition it takes place under the table.” And, despite its neutral-sounding name, “voting integrity” has had an incendiary history. “It’s one of those great euphemisms,” Pamela S. Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School, says. “By and large, it’s been targeted at minority voters.” During the Senate hearings on William Rehnquist’s nomination as Chief Justice, in 1986, a number of witnesses testified that in the early nineteen-sixties Rehnquist, then a lawyer in private practice and a Republican political activist, had harassed black and Latino voters at Arizona polling places, demanding to know if they were “qualified to vote.” (Rehnquist denied doing so.) In the 1981 governor’s race in New Jersey, the Republican Party hired armed off-duty police officers to work in a self-described National Ballot Security Task Force, which posted signs at polling places in minority neighborhoods reading, “Warning, This Area Is Being Patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force. It Is a Crime to Falsify a Ballot or to Violate Election Laws.”

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[CarolynEC]

1. Ashcroft safeguarding core American rights?

I'll start laughing, just as soon as I'm done weeping.