McClatchy’s Greg Gordon today:
Michael Slater, the Oregon-based deputy director of the national registration group Project Vote, said officials of the Justice Department’s civil rights division showed little interest in enforcing that part of the law.
…
He said the groups’ representatives told the Justice Department officials: “Look, we have physical hard evidence that states aren’t doing this. They’re taking their eye off the ball. We want to see some enforcement.”
Slater said [Bush-appointee to the DoJ Civil Rights division, Hans] von Spakovsky listened quietly and then made comments to the effect of “hmmm” and “that’s interesting,” but took no action.
Emails from Von Spakovsky recently revealed that he was also busy strong-arming and attempting “deals” with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) on a number of issues concerning disenfranchising Photo ID poll restrictions around that same time. For his efforts in all of the above, of course, von Spakovsky would later be recess-appointed by Bush to chair the Federal Elections Commission (FEC). We yelled about that appointment back in January of 2006 when nobody was listening.
A sampling of the extraordinary disparity in numbers of voter registrations taken by government agencies under the Clinton DoJ v. Bush DoJ…
And as Gordon had reported earlier this week for McClatchy (in a story subsequently altered and butchered by the partisan Kansas City Star when they ran it in their pages, as we reported here), the Bush DoJ “sued election officials in seven states – Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, New Jersey and New York – and sent threatening letters to others, in some cases demanding copies of voter registration data.”
While “researchers have found no evidence of widespread voter fraud,” Gordon reported, “no lawsuits have targeted states whose elections were managed solely by Republican officials.”
Imagine that.
Oh…and in Michigan, where the Republican Sec. of State set up an aggressive program to purge ineligible voters from the rolls, such as those who had died, “A public records request to the state showed that about 400 people who got notices that they were dead telephoned a hot line to say they weren’t.”
“A public records request to the state showed that about 400 people who got notices that they were dead telephoned a hot line to say they weren’t.”
go here to see VIDEO of Republican voter suppression efforts in action!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuvB7j9n-II