Bush Administration Doctors Another Report

The Bush administration’s cynical manipulation of information is well documented.

From fabrications about Iraq (weapons of mass destruction, fictional uranium purchases in Niger and associating Saddam Hussein with 9/11) to the rewriting of scientific reports on global warming by Bush appointee, Philip A. Cooney (a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute with no scientific training), this administration has made truth a casualty of political expediency.

Now we have learned that the Republican campaign against voter fraud is itself fraudulent.

The New York Times reported yesterday that a Republican dominated panel, the Election Assistance Commission, rewrote a federal study that concluded that voter fraud is nonexistent to suggest exactly the opposite.

Allegations of voter fraud have been used to enact voter identification laws in at least two dozen states. And the failure to vigorously pursue voter fraud was one of the reasons used to fire eight United States attorneys which is now under investigation by the United States Congress.

Most objective commentators have argued that voter fraud was being used by Republican operatives to suppress traditionally Democratic voters, the poor, members of minority groups and the elderly, who are less likely to have photo IDs.

Though the original report said that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud,” the final version of the report released to the public concluded in its executive summary that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.”

There was no voter fraud. The Republican manufactured campaign against voter fraud is itself fraudulent.