Not so for the American Center for Voting Rights, which has vanished with no notice, little comment and with no apparent replacement. This operation – the only prominent nongovernmental organization claiming that voter fraud is a major problem – simply stopped appearing at government panels and conferences sometime late last year.
Its Web domain name has expired, its reports are all gone (except where they have been preserved by its opponents), and its general counsel, Mark Hearne, has cleansed his résumé of his affiliation. He also won't speak to the press about the group's demise.
Its life and death says a lot about the Karl Rove-led Republican strategy of raising voter fraud as a crisis in American elections. One part of the attack, at the heart of the Justice Department scandals, involved getting U.S. attorneys in battleground states to vigorously prosecute cases of voter fraud. After exhaustive effort, Justice discovered virtually no polling-place voter fraud, and its efforts to fire U.S. attorneys who did not push the voter-fraud line enough has backfired.
