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| Charts: UFO Sightings Are More Common Than Voter Fraud |
The GOP's 10-year campaign to gin up voter fraud hysteria—and bring back Jim Crow at the ballot box.
On March 21, 2005, a sandy-haired
43-year-old attorney named Mark "Thor" Hearne took a seat under the
Greek Revival dome of the Ohio Statehouse to testify before the House
Administration Committee. The committee was holding a field hearing on
the subject of voter fraud, a hot topic in Congress—and in Ohio, where
George W. Bush had eked out a narrow, hotly contested victory over John
Kerry the year before.
Hearne introduced
himself as counsel for the American Center for Voting Rights. The
Buckeye State, he said, had suffered from "massive" registration fraud
during the presidential election. Liberal groups like ACORN and the
AFL-CIO were implicated in illegal voter registration schemes. An NAACP
operative had paid for fake registrations in crack. Then, after
enrolling thousands of phony voters, these same groups had flooded the
courts with lawsuits designed to create bedlam on Election Day and
prevent fraudulent votes from being discovered. To back up his story,
Hearne submitted a 31-page report, signed by more than a dozen Ohio
attorneys.
It was a startlingly lurid picture—and the latest chapter in a
long-simmering feud between Republicans, who claim that fraud is rampant
in US elections, and Democrats, who say such charges are merely an
excuse to suppress the vote. Still, there was something different about
this episode. It wasn't just a one-off bit of bluster during a bitter
recount battle. That would have been politics as usual. Instead, it
marked a dramatic widening of the war. This was, after all, a
congressional hearing, and Hearne represented an organization dedicated
to pushing Republican claims of voter fraud not just during
post-election court fights, but everywhere and all the time. READ MORE
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