aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, June 15, 2007

Voter Fraud Ministry of Truth

Georgia and Texas are at the heart of the voter fraud story, with their dubious redistricting and onerous voter identification laws. Now that we know there is virtually no evidence that voter fraud ever existed, the voter fraud crowd is trying to rewrite history and erase the facts to hide its dubious intellectual underpinnings.

Richard L. Hasen is doing absolutely stupendous work, on display most recently at Slate, uncovering the foils and fudging of the voter fraud warriors:

In a recent Slate column, I noted the strange demise of the American Center for Voting Rights, an organization that sprouted up in the last few years to push the “voter fraud is a big problem” line at government hearings, conferences, and, most importantly, in the courts to defend strict new voter-ID laws. The brains behind ACVR is a St. Louis lawyer, Mark “Thor” Hearne, who has worked for the Bush-Cheney campaign and other Republican candidates for years. Oddly, the organization suddenly disbanded recently and yanked its Web site. Even more strangely, Hearne’s résumé at his law firm, Lathrop and Gage, was scrubbed of references to ACVR. Thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine and blogs like the Brad Blog, much of ACVR’s material still remains available, however. You just can’t erase stuff put out in cyberspace very easily.

But Hearne apparently wasn’t satisfied with just cleansing his résumé. Despite the Slate article and follow-up by NPR, National Journal, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Hearne, ACVR, and his possible connection to the U.S. attorneys’ scandal, someone is working hard to scrub Hearne’s paper trail. And now somebody is going into Hearne’s Wikipedia entry and trying to cleanse it of references to ACVR. (Just about anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry, though the organizers have some methods of quality control.) Moreover, someone’s been trying to clean up Wikipedia’s entry on ACVR itself.

Who would do such a thing? Wikipedia keeps records of the user IDs or IP addresses of whoever changes its pages, and it turns out, astonishingly, that this cleansing was done by someone at one of the IP addresses of Hearne’s law firm.

It does raise a question: Just what is it about Hearne’s work for ACVR that he or someone else at his firm is trying to hide?

Read on for the doublespeak of Hans von Spakovsky and Bradley Schlozman. More on von Spakovsky here and Schlozman here