Unchastened, NM Republicans Still Pushing Voter FraudThis morning, we noticed an RNC press release in our inbox, breathlessly touting an Associated Press story that reports:
“The New Mexico Republican Party say they believe 28 people voted fraudulently in an Albuquerque state House district in the June Democratic primary.”
Of course, as faithful TPMmuckraker readers know, David Iglesias — who yesterday told us he was “astounded” by the FBI’s new investigation of ACORN in connection with nationwide voter fraud — was fired as U.S. attorney for the district of New Mexico in large part for failing to follow up on voter fraud complaints with sufficient aggressiveness to please the Bush administration. And many of those complaints came also from the New Mexico Republican Party.
According to the recently released report on the firings by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, Allen Weh, the state party chair, continually pressed Iglesias to make voter fraud a priority, and in 2005 sent an email to Karl Rove and others in the White House office in which he asked for Iglesias to be removed, and a replacement appointed “that takes voter fraud seriously.”
The report concluded:
complaints from New Mexico Republican politicians and party activists about Iglesias’s handling of voter fraud and corruption cases were the reasons for his
removal as U.S. Attorney.
And it left no doubt that the Bush administration’s decision to act on these complaints represented inappropriate politicization of the Department of Justice.
Still, it looks like the party is still out there pushing the issue.
It’s not that we were expecting the GOP to act chastened after getting caught pressuring non-partisan law enforcement officials to pursue bogus and politically motivated cases of voter fraud.
But sometimes the cognitive dissonance is too much to let pass.