EXCLUSIVE: Complete Letter from DoJ's Civil Rights Division to NY AG Elliot Spitzer
Additional Reporting by John Gideon
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice threatened in a letter to sue New York state over its failure to modernize its voting system in compliance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. The BRAD BLOG has obtained a copy of the complete letter sent from Asst. Attorney General Wan J. Kim, of the DoJ's Civil Rights Division, to NY's Attorney General Elliot Spitzer and General Counsel Todd Valentine.
In the letter, Kim informs the state that he has received authorization to file "a lawsuit on behalf of the United States against the State of New York as well as the New York State Board of Elections, et al."
That, despite the Federal Government's own egregious failures to fully comply with HAVA requirments. The lawsuit against the "blue state" would be the first attempted action taken against any state by DoJ for failing to meet the requirements of HAVA since one of its major deadlines passed on January 1 of this year.
The complete letter from the DoJ is posted at the bottom of this article.
As reported by the New York Times today the DoJ has accused New York of being further behind than every other state in complying with new guidelines laid out by HAVA:
The question now, for Election Reform advocates, is whether Elliott Spitzer, the aggressive New York State Attorney General, will stand up to this threat and point out to the DoJ the extraordinarily lax execution of HAVA by the federal government themselves! Given the Feds' own lack of compliance of the disastrous "Election Reform" bill hastily created in the wake of the 2000 Florida Election Debacle, the ironies here are many. The legislation itself, as revealed in a recent BRAD BLOG exposé, was apparently financed by voting machine vendors such as Diebold, and other shady characters named in the Jack Abramoff scandal.
In a report titled Is HAVA Being Abused? Part II; Good for the Goose; Why Not for the Gander?, written by Ellen Theisen in 2005, the then Executive Director of VotersUnite.Org exmined the Feds' own failures in implementing the flawed bill, including George W. Bush's own apparent violation of the law...
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