53406544.

doc Page 1 of 5

March 9, 2008

‘Myth’ of Voter Fraud Focus of Senate

Hearing
Iglesias Set to Testify
By Jason Leopold

Last year, during the height of the Congressional investigation into the firings of US
attorneys, David Iglesias and John McKay, two of the nine federal prosecutors who
were ousted, revealed that they were pressured by Republicans to bring charges of
vote fraud against people who intended to voter for Democrats in separate elections
in New Mexico and Washington state several years ago.
Iglesias and McKay said they investigated the allegations but did not find evidence to
support charges of voter fraud leveled by Republicans. Both men believe their refusal
to convene a federal criminal grand jury to pursue the allegations led to their ouster.
There is no concrete evidence of systemic voter fraud in the United States. Many
election integrity experts believe voter fraud is a ploy by Republicans to suppress
minorities and poor people from voting. Historically, those groups tend to vote for
Democratic candidates. Raising red flags about the integrity of the ballots, experts
believe, is an attempt by GOP operatives to swing elections to their candidates as
well as an attempt to use the fear of criminal prosecution to discourage individuals
from voting in future races.
Now a Senate panel chaired by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein is investigating
whether the myth of voter fraud has led to "disenfranchisement" among individual
voters.
On Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration is scheduled to
hold a hearing to explore the matter. Iglesias is one of the witnesses who will testify
about the issue. In an interview, he said he intends to recount how his office was
pressured to file voter fraud charges.
Iglesias said in an interview that he had set up a task force and launched an in-depth
investigation into claims of voter fraud in New Mexico and found the allegations to be
“non-provable in court.” He said he is certain that his firing was due, in part, to the
fact that he would not file criminal charges of voter fraud in New Mexico. Iglesias
added that, based on evidence that had surfaced thus far and "Karl Rove's obsession
with voter fraud issues throughout the country," he now believes GOP operatives had
wanted him to go after Democratic-funded organizations in an attempt to swing the
2006 midterm elections to Republicans.
The other witnesses scheduled to testify Wednesday include Robin Carnahan, the
Secretary of State of Missouri, Robert Simms, and Georgia’s Deputy Secretary of
State. Republicans have pushed through controversial voter identification bills in
those states that appeared to make it difficult for people who don't have driver’s
53406544.doc Page 2 of 5

licenses to vote. Federal courts blocked the measures. Additionally, Justin Levitt, an
attorney and expert on voting issues who teaches at the Brennan Center for Justice
at New York University School of Law, and Jeff Milyo, a professor at the University of
Missouri-Columbia department of economics, will also be on hand to testify.
In a column click here published in the Washington Post last year, Levitt said "the
notion of widespread voter fraud... is itself a fraud. Evidence of actual fraud by
individual voters is painfully skimpy."
A common thread among Republican claims of voter fraud in New Mexico and
Missouri that will be discussed during Wednesday's hearing is the work conducted in
Missouri and New Mexico by a now defunct group called the American Center for
Voting Rights (ACVR), formerly headed by Mark "Thor" Hearne, a Republican
operative who served as the national election counsel to the Bush/Cheney
presidential campaign. Hearne worked closely with Rove and the Republican National
Committee to raise issues of voter fraud in battleground states during the 2004
presidential election. Hearne's organization touted itself as an organization that
sought to defend voter rights and increase public confidence in the fairness and
outcome of elections. However, evidence has surfaced that showed Hearne's group
played a major role in suppressing the votes of people who intended to cast ballots
for Democrats in states where Republicans faced tough reelection campaigns.
Additionally, Hearne and his associates are believed to have played a direct role in
Iglesias's firing as well as the forced resignation of Todd Graves, the former US
attorney for Kansas City, Missouri.
Graves was forced to resign in March 2006, Mckay, the former US attorney for the
Western District of Washington, believes, because Graves would not file criminal
charges of voter fraud against four employees of ACORN, a group that registers low-
income individuals who tend to cast votes for Democrats, nor would he bow to
pressure from Hearne and a Justice Department official to file a civil suit against
Carnahan, Missouri's Secretary of State, on charges that Carnahan failed to take
action on cases of voter fraud. The DOJ's Civil Rights Division filed the civil suit
against Carnahan, which was later dismissed by a federal court judge who ruled, "The
United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to
vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States. Nor has the United
States shown that any voter fraud has occurred."
Graves was swiftly replaced by Bradley Schlozman, the former head of the Justice
Department's Civil Rights Division's voting-rights section, who had regularly clashed
with Graves about cases of voter fraud and who spoke to Hearne regularly about US
attorneys who allegedly refused to pursue such cases.
McKay said that when Schlozman was selected to replace Graves as US attorney,
"many eyebrows were raised."
"Many US attorneys were concerned when Mr. Schlozman was appointed," McKay
said in an interview last year. "He was the deputy in the [Justice Department's] civil
rights division, but I don't think he had the sort of background and experience we
would have expected as a United States attorney," McKay told me. "So I would say it
would be true that many eyebrows were raised when he was first appointed. Of
course, we didn't know that Todd Graves had been forced to resign ... and it appears
that he was forced to resign at least in part because Mr. Schlozman himself was
trying to push the prosecution of voter fraud cases."
Schlozman filed federal criminal charges of voter fraud against members of ACORN
on the evening of the November 2006 mid-term election. The case was later
dismissed and Schlozman came under fire for his actions. Long standing Justice
Department policy states that charges related to voter fraud should not be close to
53406544.doc Page 3 of 5

an election. Schlozman testified before a Senate committee last year that he

received approval to file the voter fraud charges from a Justice Department official
who was instrumental in drafting the guidelines urging that US attorneys avoid filing
charges claiming voter fraud at the height of an election. At the time, Iglesias stated
that he had worked with the same Election Crimes Unit Attorney and simply did "not
believe" Schlozman's testimony.
Hearne also took part in a conference call during the 2004 presidential campaign
with several high-ranking Bush administration officials who discussed strategies of
suppressing votes in battleground states, such as Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania,
where Bush was trailing Democratic nominee John Kerry.
An email, http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072607A.shtml dated September 30,
2004, and sent to a dozen or so staffers on the Bush-Cheney campaign and the RNC,
under the subject line "voter reg fraud strategy conference call," describes how
campaign staffers planned to challenge the veracity of votes in a handful of
battleground states, such as Ohio, in the event of a Democratic victory.
Emails among Ohio Republican Party official Michael Magan, Coddy Johnson, then
national field director of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, and Timothy Griffin, reveal
the men were given documents that could be used as evidence to justify widespread
voter challenges if the Bush campaign needed to contest the election results. Johnson
referred to the documents as a "goldmine". In mid-2006 Griffin, a former RNC
operative and close friend of Karl Rove, expressed an interest in becoming the US
attorney in Arkansas. The DOJ fired Bud Cummins, the state’s US attorney at the
time, to make room for Griffin who resigned in disgrace last year when his role in
“vote caging” surfaced.
The documents Hearne and his counterparts obtained were lists of registered voters
who did not return address confirmation forms to the Ohio Board of Elections. The
Republican operatives compared this list with lists of voters who requested absentee
ballots. In the opinion of one of the strategists, the fact that many names appeared
on both lists was evidence of voter fraud. "A bad registration card can be an accident
or fraud. A bad card AND an Absentee Ballot request is a clear case of fraud," former
Bush-Cheney campaign staffer Robert Paduchik wrote in a 2004 email.
But Christopher McInerney, a RNC researcher, warned his colleagues at the time that
if "other states...don't have flagged voter rolls, we run the risk of having GOP
fingerprints."
In New Mexico, Iglesias said in an interview that Pat Rogers, a Republican attorney in
Albuquerque, and Mickey Barnett, a Republican lobbyist, pressured him to bring
charges of voter fraud.
Rogers worked for Hearne's ACVR group. Rogers is also the former chief counsel to
the New Mexico Republican Party and had lost in litigation over a proposed voter ID
law. He was tapped by Domenici to replace Iglesias as US Attorney for New Mexico
when Iglesias was fired.
Rogers has not responded to emails seeking comment. But in prior email
correspondence he has insisted that he did not play a role in Iglesias's firing and
categorically denied that he pressured Iglesias to bring charges of voter fraud against
Democrats.
Recently, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which is
investigating the US attorney firings with particular attention being paid to Iglesias's
dismissal, interviewed Rumaldo Armijo, Iglesias's former executive assistant, to find
out whether he was pressured by Rogers and Barnett to file criminal charges of voter
fraud in the state in 2004. During his tenure in the US attorney's office, Armijo was in
53406544.doc Page 4 of 5

charge of voter issues and worked with Iglesias’s task force to probe the matter,
Iglesias confirmed.
Armijo spoke to the Senate Ethics Committee last year about numerous telephone
calls and emails dating back to 2005 he received from Rogers related to voter fraud,
and Iglesias's alleged failure to investigate the matter while Iglesias was US attorney,
Iglesias confirmed.
Last May, House Democrats released a transcript of an interview congressional
investigators had with one of Gonzales's senior Justice Department staffers, Matthew
Friedrich, in which Friedrich recounted that over breakfast in November 2006, Rogers
and Barnett told him they were frustrated about Iglesias's refusal to pursue cases of
voter fraud and that they had spoken to Karl Rove and Domenici about having
Iglesias fired.
"I remember them repeating basically what they had said before in terms of
unhappiness with Dave Iglesias and the fact that this case hadn't gone anyplace,"
Friedrich said, according to a copy of the interview transcript. "It was clear to me that
they did not want him to be the US attorney. And they mentioned that they had
essentially . . . they were sort of working towards that."
According to media reports, Rogers said he does not recall speaking to Rove about
Iglesias.
Additionally, Barnett and Rogers met with Monica Goodling, the Justice Department's
White House liaison, in June 2006 to complain that Iglesias was ignoring voter fraud.
Goodling's meeting with Rogers and Barnett took place at the urging of a colleague.
Rogers also drafted a lengthy letter that he sent to Domenici detailing what he
claimed were Iglesias's prosecutorial failures, Iglesias said he had been told.
Allen Weh, the New Mexico Republican Party chairman, told McClatchy Newspapers in
March that he urged Rove to use his influence to have Iglesias fired because Weh
was unhappy with Iglesias's alleged refusal to bring criminal charges against
Democrats in a voter fraud investigation.
Weh told McClatchy Newspapers that he followed up with Rove personally in late
2006 during a visit to the White House.
"Is anything ever going to happen to that guy?" Weh said he asked Rove at a White
House holiday event that month, according to McClatchy's report.
"He's gone," Rove said, according to Weh.
"I probably said something close to 'Hallelujah,'" said Weh.
This chain of events troubles McKay who wrote in a Seattle University law review
article in January that former Attorney General Gonzales ultimately approved
Iglesias's termination with the full knowledge that it was based on partisan politics.
For his part, McKay believes his firing was due to the fact that Republicans were
angry that he did not convene a federal grand jury to pursue allegations of voter
fraud related to the 2004 governor's election in the state, in which Democrat
Christine Gregoire defeated Republican Dino Rossi by a margin of 129 votes.
In an interview, McKay said there were some Republicans in his district with close ties
to the White House who demanded he launch an investigation into the election and
bring charges against individuals--Democrats--for vote-rigging. He believes his
refusal to haul "innocent people before a grand jury" was the reason he was not
selected for a federal judgeship by local Republicans in Washington state in 2006.
53406544.doc Page 5 of 5

McKay said that, at the time, he felt he was not being treated fairly, and requested a
meeting with then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers to discuss the issue, as well as
his application for US district judge in his home state.
"I asked for a meeting with Harriet Miers, whom I had known since work I had been
involved in with the American Bar Association, and she immediately agreed to see
me in August of 2006," McKay said. He added that when he met with Miers and her
deputy William Kelley at the White House, the first thing they asked him was, "Why
would Republicans in the state of Washington be angry with you?"
That was "a clear reference to the 2004 governor's election," McKay said in
characterizing Miers and her deputy's comments. "Some believed I should convene a
federal grand jury and bring innocent people before the grand jury."
"All of my actions as United States attorney had been coordinated with the
Department of Justice," McKay told me. He said he explained that to Miers and Kelley,
and informed them that there was no evidence of voter fraud to support launching a
federal inquiry into the election.
McKay said he believes the meeting he had with Miers and Kelley directly led to his
name being placed on a list of US attorneys selected for dismissal in December 2006.
Authors Website: www.newsjunkiebook.com
Authors Bio: Jason Leopold is the author of the National Bestseller, News Junkie, a
memoir. Mr. Leopold is also a two-time winner of the Project Censored award, most
recently, in 2007, for an investigative story related to Halliburton's work in Iran.