The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a panel charged with overseeing the implementation of federal election requirements, ought to be scrupulously fair, but it has failed one of its earliest tests.
The commission manipulated the findings of a voter fraud report so that it conveniently jibes with a White House agenda.
Presidential adviser Karl Rove has been emphasizing the threat of voter fraud in an effort to win stricter voter-ID laws. Such laws tend to suppress Democratic turnout.
A report done for the EAC concluded that there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud. However, the final version brushed past that conclusion and found that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud,” according to The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the first version.
What’s disconcerting about the revision of the EAC report is that the panel is supposed to be a bipartisan entity that local governments can count on as they improve their voting systems.
Colorado’s own Donetta Davidson, chairwoman of the commission, explained that the report was revised after EAC staffers decided the original was thin on data. They presented the revision to commissioners for approval in December. Davidson said the commission “had always stuck to being bipartisan.”
That’s certainly not the implication in an e-mail one of the authors of the report sent to an EAC staffer. Job Serebrov, a Republican elections lawyer from Arkansas hired by the commission, defended the original work. He wrote in the message, obtained by The Times, that he and a liberal-leaning co-author strove to produce a truthful report. “I could care less that the results are not what the more conservative members of my party wanted,” the e-mail said.
The issue of voter fraud has been a recurring theme in the sudden firings of eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom reportedly were in the doghouse for not being aggressive enough about voter fraud cases. It’s an issue that Rove raised before a GOP lawyers group last year, calling it an “enormous and growing” problem.
Recently, the EAC was criticized for delaying the findings of a report that said some state voter-ID laws disenfranchise voters. The EAC issued a statement on Wednesday about the research it contracts out, saying the commission planned to “take a hard look at the way we do business.”
That’s a promise the commission ought to keep. Otherwise Congress, which created the commission as an impartial resource, should seek a remedy.
