It is now clear that the burgeoning scandal over the firings of 8 U.S. Attorneys had nothing to do with their competence and much to do with the concerted GOP/Bush Administration efforts to politicize the federal justice system.

This national political strategy, orchestrated by Karl Rove from inside the White House, had a common thread--the manipulation of vote fraud allegations to pass repressive voter identification laws to intimidate blocs of voters such as recent immigrants and African Americans from fully participating in the electoral system.

Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita was a member of the Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) working group on vote fraud issues. On page 28 of the EAC’s draft report (PDF), Rokita is quoted as questioning whether the EAC should be using political scientists to try to determine the existence and amount of vote fraud at the polls. It is clear that Rokita wanted the EAC to accept on faith his belief the voter impersonation is a pervasive problem. “We’re not sure that fraud at the polling place doesn’t exist”, the EAC report quotes him as saying. This sounds an awful lot like the conclusion in the publicly-released version of the EAC voter fraud/intimidation report that “There is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud,” a statement the NY Times describes in its editorial as a “deliberate effort to mislead the public.” Rokita wants everyone to assume the existence of systematic vote fraud and then put the burden on the opponents of strict voter ID requirements to prove a negative. In other words, because Rokita believes in the tooth fairy, it’s up to you and me to prove him wrong. Rokita’s role in this deception is finally being held up to critical scrutiny by national election law experts such as Rick Hasen.

It was recently reported that Rokita suggested at a political dinner in southern Indiana that the Democratic Party and African-Americans were in a “master-slave” relationship. Many of the dozens of elected black Democratic officials throughout Indiana are likely to find those Imus-like remarks-- equating their personal political preference for the Democratic Party to the slavery of their ancestors-- to be deeply offensive. This obvious antipathy for his political opponents should dispel any lingering doubts that the enactment of the Indiana photo ID law had anything other than purely political objectives and that it was a component of a national strategy to deliberately mislead the public into thinking voter fraud was a pervasive problem to justify placing severe burdens on the right to vote.

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