With all the uproar about alleged voter fraud, I thought it might be interesting to look back at the 2004 election, which is often the springboard for such allegations.
Kate Nelson of the Albuquerque Tribune summed up the political climate at the time of the 2004 election well in a Jan. 29, 2005 article:
“(It was alleged that) apolitical slackers in search of the $7-a-voter bounty some groups were paying simply opened phone books to borrow the fill-in-the-blanks necessities,” she wrote. “County clerks were deluged with good forms and bad. The election was looming. An unsuccessful lawsuit demanded that at least some voters show some form of identification.”
“State Sen. Rod Adair, a Roswell Republican, predicted that thousands of fraudulent voters would flood the polls,” Nelson wrote. “U.S. Attorney David Iglesias trumpeted his formation of a nonpartisan election fraud task force a steely-eyed squad of enforcers to root out every electoral miscreant.”
The result? Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Two weeks after the election, more than 100 complaints of potential voter fraud were submitted, the Tribune reported.
None were prosecuted.
That’s right: There were no prosecutions by
That puts a dent in Republicans’ current allegations of a massive voter-fraud conspiracy.
There have absolutely been some serious problems with elections across the state. But if the Republican U.S. attorney, FBI and Democratic secretary of state couldn’t find prosecutable voter fraud, who will?
Incompetence, lax procedures and constantly changing laws appear to be the cause of most of the problems.
Two things need to be admitted here. The first is that there’s no proof voter fraud is prevalent in
If Republicans admitted the first and Democrats admitted the second, we would be a lot closer to making progress on this controversial topic.