Oct 22, 2007 -- National Journal: Voting Rights Controversy Another Mess For DOJ
By Eliza Newlin Carney

U.S. District Court Judge Michael Mukasey will have a very big mess to clean up at the Justice Department if he is confirmed, as expected, to be attorney general.

Among the many problems Mukasey will have to fix is Justice's questionable handling of voting rights, which department officials have arguably set out to suppress rather than protect.

As American Civil Liberties Union leaders put it in a recent letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the department's Civil Rights Division has not only failed to advance civil liberties -- it "has even gone so far as to switch sides from defending the civil rights of minority plaintiffs to opposing them."

Nothing illustrates Justice's blatantly partisan and discriminatory agenda better than recent public comments by John Tanner , the chief of the Civil Rights Division's Voting Section. At the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles earlier this month, Tanner stated that voter ID restrictions may disenfranchise "elderly voters," but not minority voters because "minorities don't become elderly the way white people do. They die first."

Tanner's remarks drew only a couple of glancing references from the national news media, but they have attracted attention on Capitol Hill. His comments were initially posted by alert blogger Brad Friedman , with corroborating video captured by guest blogger Alan Breslauer .

Presidential hopeful and Sen. Barack Obama , D-Ill., on Oct. 19 wrote to acting Attorney General Peter Keisler , asking that he remove Tanner from his post. Comments such as Tanner's "are patently erroneous, offensive and dangerous, and they are especially troubling coming from the federal official charged with protecting voting rights in this country," Obama wrote.

Nor are Tanner's ill-advised statements at the National Latino Congreso the only thing riling members of Congress. Shortly after Tanner made his inflammatory remarks, another astute blogger -- Paul Kiel , of TPM Muckraker -- followed up with a report detailing Tanner's controversial response to massive polling place problems in Columbus, Ohio, in 2004.

As was widely reported at the time, a shortage of voting machines in largely black precincts left minority voters standing in line for hours on Election Day. But in 2005, Tanner took the unusual step of writing to Ohio officials to defend and justify their decision to distribute machines disproportionately to predominantly white precincts.

The disparity did not disenfranchise voters, Tanner wrote, because of "the tendency in Franklin County for white voters to cast ballots in the morning, (i.e., before work), and for black voters to cast ballots in the afternoon (i.e., after work)." This drew a sharp rebuke from Rep. John Conyers , D-Mich., whose 2005 investigation, "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio," [PDF] drew a very different conclusion.

That report "revealed huge racial disparities in how voting machines were distributed in white and black precincts, among other findings," Conyers said in an Oct. 12 statement. Conyers and Rep. Jerrold Nadler , D-N.Y., who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, had asked Tanner to testify on Capitol Hill in July, but he declined.

Now Tanner is tentatively scheduled to appear before Nadler's subcommittee on Oct. 30. In his statement, Conyers added that the 2004 election "exposed serious deficiencies in [the Voting] Section's failure to adequately investigate and prosecute voter suppression efforts nationwide and I hope he [Tanner] is prepared to address this issue head on."

Nadler told TPM Muckraker that he hopes Tanner "will be as willing to provide lawmakers with the same candid views he has been providing at various public venues," and that the hearing "will also offer lawmakers the ability to address the serious concerns about the many controversial positions that the Voting Section has taken in the last few years."

At the top of the list, of course, is the U.S. attorney scandal that helped oust former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales . At issue is whether the attorneys were fired because they did not aggressively pursue supposed cases of voter fraud -- despite scant empirical evidence that fraud is actually a problem.

Also on the table is the role that Tanner and former Justice official Hans von Spakovsky played in approving a controversial Georgia voter ID law that was later thrown out in court as discriminatory. Not to mention the Justice Department's controversial campaign to pressure states to drastically purge their voter rolls, based on data that critics say was faulty.

"The Justice Department has been doing everything in its power... to engage in partisan motivated conduct that has had the effect of disenfranchising voters, particularly minority voters," said David Becker , a former trial attorney in the department's Voting Section who now directs the Democracy Campaign at People for the American Way.

Senators are now considering whether to confirm von Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission. Obama and Sen. Russell Feingold , D-Wis., argue convincingly that he is not fit for the post, and are currently blocking his confirmation. Obama also called on Mukasey in an Oct. 17 letter to address "a systematic failure by the Department of Justice to exhibit any significant commitment to upholding civil rights" in a number of areas, including voting rights.

If confirmed, Mukasey must now make good on his promise to restore integrity and credibility to the Justice Department. His first step should be to replace John Tanner with someone less patently biased and ill-informed.