I filed the final brief with the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday, asking that Court to agree to review the highly controversial split decision of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals which upheld the constitutionality of Indiana’s 2005 law that requires all persons who wish to vote in person (the Law excludes mail-in absentee voters from the ID requirements) to produce a government-issued license with a photograph.

Among the remarkable features of this case is the fact that the State conceded that the General Assembly had no evidence that even a single person had ever been charged with, much less convicted of, the crime of imposter voting. The State defended its enactment of the Law simply referring to “reports” of such voter fraud from other states. In the past two years, every one of those “reports” has proved to be unfounded. In fact, it has since become clear that some of these “reports” were deliberately concocted and then widely-spread by Bush Administration political operatives to justify the enactment of restrictive voter-ID laws in an effort to game the political system in favor of the Republican Party. Congress is currently investigating whether at least two U.S. attorneys, David Iglesias and John McKay, were fired because they failed to play along with this political strategy.

“Making shit up” to justify repressive governmental policies is hardly a new strategy, but one the current Administration has perfected to a high art form. Prof. Lorraine Minnite of Columbia University, who has published the definitive work on what she calls the “politics of voter fraud”, recently emailed me to comment that the Indiana case is an excellent example of how this strategy works. First, get partisans to make wild claims, unfounded allegations, and stage press events to draw media attention to a potentially dangerous situation, e.g., “massive voter fraud”, “weapons of mass destruction”, etc. Then, once media reports have been generated, use them as “evidence” of the problem sought to be remedied. (This is like Karl Rove acknowledging that although Iraq had no WMDs, this county’s invasion of that country was nonetheless justified because “the whole world thought Saddam had WMDs”, a belief that the Administration ginned up through its incessant repeating of the charge in the run-up to the war.) Prof. Minnite describes this tactic as “beautiful in its simplicity”, and devastatingly effective. She told me its use as political propaganda can be traced back to post-Civil War southern racists, who used the newspapers to degrade black legislators who for a brief time during Reconstruction actually were elected to many offices and held real political power.

Politics rather than the evidence has come to dominate nearly every aspect of policymaking in the current Administration. It is among the most important missions of the American Values Alliance that we insist that our elected officials formulate public policy on facts and evidence, and not on rumors, speculation or unfounded accusations.

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