“Voter fraud”: all you need to know about this fraud

At TPM Muckraker is the story of how the US Attorney in Missouri lowered the boom on four hapless voter registrars, right before election.

News coverage of the indictments tended to buttress the notion that liberal groups like ACORN were conspiring to steal the election. The indictments were covered by Fox News (where a Kansas City election official was quoted as saying that it was “the worst case of registration abuse in the last quarter century”), as well as the AP, CNN, and other nationwide outlets. Schlozman announced in a statement that “This national investigation is very much ongoing.”

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According to Elyshya Miller, ACORN’s head organizer for Kansas City, ACORN identified certain forms as potentially fraudulent and turned them over to prosecutors in late October; four organizers were responsible. A week later, all four organizers were indicted by a grand jury.

But in their evident haste to indict, the prosecutors made a mistake — they indicted the wrong person. Three weeks after the election, Schlozman’s office dropped the charges against one of the defendants, Stephanie Davis, admitting that her identity was used without her permission. It was not until January of this year that Schlozman’s office finally indicted one Caren Davis, who was apparently the person they were really after. Caren Davis’ lawyer Dana Altieri told me that Davis is currently undergoing a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether she is competent to stand trial.

But let’s look at the indicted crimes themselves. The four defendants were accused of forging the registration forms for a grand total of six voters (Caren Davis was responsible for three). In some cases, the defendants simply made people up; others forged the registrations for real people.

As The New York Times has noted, “the forms could likely never be used in voting.” Other U.S. attorneys had declined to pursue similar cases — in fact, despite Schlozman’s “national investigation,” these were the only charges filed against ACORN organizers nationwide in 2006.