Mar 13, 2008 -- No Final Answers in Voter Fraud Report Suppression Investigation: Statement of J. Gerald Hebert, Campaign Legal Center Executive Director

The flawed and vaguely worded report issued by the Inspector General involving a "Voter Fraud and Voter Intimidation Report" from the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) raises more questions than it answers. The report itself should not be the final word on the subject and congressional hearings should be held to get to the bottom of this controversy.

In the face of two directly contradictory accounts by two EAC Commissioners regarding significant outside pressure to suppress the report (possibly from the Bush White House), the IG report not only fails to resolve these contradictions, it fails to come to a conclusion about whether an EAC Commissioner was pressured into blocking the report. Perhaps the best way to get to the bottom of this is to have both Commissioners answer questions under oath to see if their memories improve under such circumstances.

When it comes to the matter of whether the White House put pressure on one of the EAC Commissioners, the language of the report turns vague, imprecise and inconclusive. The conclusions of the report that there was no White House pressure to alter the report's language may well turn out to be true, but the IG report does not resolve the question of whether the White House or some other external force attempted to block the EAC voter fraud/intimidation report.

The public deserves to know if external pressure was brought to bear on the EAC to delay and suppress the report. It also deserves to get a full accounting of why a federal agency, to use the IG's words, funded a project that was ill-conceived and mismanaged. The IG's report doesn't fully answer these questions, but congressional hearings should produce answers. That is especially important with an agency like the EAC, which will spend significant taxpayer dollars on projects in the years ahead that involve matters involving the foundations of our democracy and how we conduct our elections.