The still unfolding scandal over the political firings of eight U.S. attorneys has a connection to Indiana that the traditional media has not yet reported on. We know that at least two of those fired district attorneys, David Iglesias of New Mexico and John McKay of Washington State, were replaced because they were unwilling to use the vast powers of their offices to indict Democrats for voter fraud. As reported on March 15 by Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog, “New Details on the Phony ‘Voter Fraud’ Angle in the U.S.Attorneys Purge Scandal”, Iglesias refused to cooperate with White House efforts to create headlines designed to convince the public of the existence of a “voter fraud” epidemic. Such disinformation was used to facilitate the passage in some states, including Indiana, of draconian voter ID laws, in much the same way the Bush Administration manipulated intelligence concerning alleged “weapons of mass destruction” to sell the war on Iraq to Congress and the public.

The chief cheerleader for the Indiana voter photo ID law, Secretary of State Todd Rokita, was forced to acknowledge in court that there was no evidence whatsoever of imposter voting in Indiana. More disturbingly it was revealed this past October that Rokita, a member of the Elections Assistance Commission’s (EAC) Voting Fraud Working Group, failed to disclose to the federal courts which were considering constitutional challenges to Indiana’s law a May 17, 2006 EAC report that was embargoed for over 4 months, a report which found “little evidence” of the voter fraud “problem” that Rokita and others had used to win the passage of the strict Indiana voter ID law. (See USA Today, “Report refutes fraud at poll sites”.) Moreover, while claiming to the courts that Indiana’s bloated voter registration laws increased the risk of imposter voting, Rokita at the same time was negotiating with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Voting Rights Section a consent decree in which the members of his own Election Division acknowledged that the State had grossly failed in its statutory duties under federal law to conduct periodic voter list maintenance programs designed to keep voting lists current.

Rokita is not shy about promoting his leadership role in the 2005 passage of Indiana’s photo ID law. His efforts also drew support from a “non-partisan” group called the “American Center for Voting Rights” (ACVR), created by the former general counsel to Bush/Cheney 2004, Mark F. (“Thor”) Hearne, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the 7th Circuit in support of Rokita’s photo ID law. The ACVR mysteriously vanished from cyberspace within days after the U.S. attorneys purge scandal began to pick up speed. Friedman reports in his March 15 post that Hearne has been working for Karl Rove all along as one of his top national operatives, the same Karl Rove who we now know as early as January 2005 inquired about firing these Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys who refused to sacrifice their personal integrity to further the national GOP’s political objectives.

With similar laws in Missouri and Georgia having been struck down on constitutional grounds, Indiana has become the principle testing ground for the White House strategy of using the mantra of “voter fraud” to justify the passage of strict voter ID laws that unnecessarily burden citizens’ right to vote. We now have evidence that national GOP operatives sought to enlist U.S. attorneys to use their offices to generate headlines about “voter fraud” to facilitate the passage of such laws and then demanded the discharge of those, like Iglesias and McKay, who refused to be stampeded by the White House into allowing their offices to be used for political purposes. That is the essence of this scandal, one in which Indiana continues to occupy a prominent but thus far little noticed role.

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