Albuquerque Journal today (from tomorrow's fish wrapper, as I couldn't find it online): Complaints include getting only one guilty conviction on 25 federal charges prosecuted against Democratic State Treasurer Robert Vigil. At the same time, Iglesias was criticized for not bringing charges on “voter fraud” in 2004. Iglesias did pursue the matter: He set up a task force on voter fraud. But...

After investigating a “hatful” of allegations brought to him, Iglesias said he did not have enough evidence to bring charges. “Most of the complaints were completely without basis,” Iglesias said. “At the end of the day, we decided we did not have any cases we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt. ...We cannot prosecute on rumor and innuendo.” Former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, a Democrat, said that Iglesias was eager to prosecute voter fraud and appointed a liaison to her office to monitor allegations. ... “I think he acted with enough force in regards to voter fraud, Vigil-Giron said in a telephone interview from New Mexico Wednesday.

Iglesias was between a rock and a hard place: Don’t prosecute and get in trouble. Prosecute a shaky case and so not win sufficient convictions? That’s bad, too. And, if you look a little closer at “voter fraud” here in the Land of Enchantment, you soon realize Iglesias was serving the Republicans better by not entering prosecutions. Why’s that? According to Greg Palast:

Last year, I flew to New Mexico to investigate the 33,981 cast but not counted ballots of that state in the 2004 race. George Bush “won” New Mexico by 5,988 votes. Or did he? I calculated that, of the all the ballots rejected and “spoiled,” 89% were cast by voters of color. Who won New Mexico? Kerry won—or he would have, if they had counted the ballots.

And another staple of voter suppression from Palast:

What’s wrong with the new ID laws? This: in the 2004 election, 300,000 voters were turned away from the polls for “wrong” ID. For example, in the “Little Texas” counties in New Mexico, if your voter registration included a middle initial but your driver’s license had none, you were kicked out of the polling station. Funny, but they only seemed to ask Hispanic voters. We should see the number of voters rejected for ID to quintuple by 2008 based on the new “voting reform” laws recently passed in several states.

New Mexico also had a lot of “undervotes” - the highest rate in the nation. And mostly amongst Native American & Hispanic voters.

More detail on New Mexico’s 2004 vote here (12-page pdf). But, of course, that’s voter suppression. Iglesias was supposed to go after voter fraud.

PHANTOM VOTES 2004

Phantom votes is the name for when a voting machine records more votes than there were voters signed in. Aha!! Iglesias could have gone after those irregularities. Surely that’s voter fraud!!!!

"That can't be what they really call them!" I exclaimed in amusement. But Lowell Finley, legal counsel for the Green/Libertarian recount effort in New Mexico, assured me that 'phantom vote' was indeed the common legal term for the puzzling phenomenon I had uncovered in looking at the state's canvass report. A phantom vote occurs when the number of votes recorded exceeds the number of ballots cast. Mathematically, phantom votes are merely the inverse of undervotes. Undervotes, which show up when there are less votes than ballots cast, can be accounted for more or less persuasively in one way or another but I have yet to come up with any acceptable explanation for phantoms. Much less, 2,087 of them statewide in New Mexico, just about one third of the margin of victory that determined the selection of that state's presidential electors.

...

Phantoms are not new to New Mexico. In the 1996 canvass report we find 998 phantom votes in Chaves County - an astonishing rate of 5.57%. In 2000 in Dona Ana County, N.M. 5,509 absentee ballots somehow resulted in 6,456 votes. When Denise Lamb at the Secretary of State's office was asked to explain the 947 phantom votes, she blamed "administrative lapses." But wait a minute - no one would accept that sort of "lapse" on a monthly bank statement or a sales receipt from the 7-11. Why would anyone accept it in this, "the most important election of our lives" in which "every vote will count and every vote will be counted"?

Except: Chaves County and Doña Ana County are in the southern part of the state, in Congressional District NM-02 where Republican Stevan Pearce was just re-elected with 60% of the vote. These were likely Republican votes! Gee, maybe Karl Rove et al. didn’t actually want Iglesias investigating this, after all. Detail on Top 20 Phantom Vote Precincts have been summarized, and there’s a pdf with complete analysis, too, thanks to the hard-working activists at Voters Unite. It’s worth remembering that phantom votes are added together with undervotes for a net value. So phantom votes not only provide “impossible” votes, they obscure unusually high rates of undervotes elsewhere at the same time.

VOTER FRAUD 2006

Then there was a little voter fraud problem reported in NM-01 this past November. A Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) poll worker may have stuffed a ballot box for Heather Wilson, and Iglesias didn’t pursue it. Wilson’s election attorney, Patrick Rogers, was very pious about it in retrospect:

“I think that honest elections are critical, and it was apparent from prior to 2004 to 2006 that it wasn’t a priority of David’s,” he said. “... When it became immediately clear to me that Iglesias was going to ignore this serious allegation, I felt it was my duty to report it. I don’t know why Mr. Iglesias exhibited no or insufficient interest in investigating evidence of voter fraud and white-collar allegations.”

Hardly sounds like the kind of neglect of prosecution that would get the folks at DoJ fired up enough to get Iglesias fired. Though I suppose I could be wrong about that. Detailed timeline from US News & World Report

These Republicans are eating their own young!! At what point will Karl Rove realize that the problem (from his POV: losing the 2006 election) doesn’t lie with the prosecution of the scandals? It lies with the underlying corruption. The problem isn’t that Carol Lam prosecuted Duke Cunningham. Any public official delivering favors for millions in bribes deserves to be in jail. Anyone who can’t see that - i.e. Rove - has a lack of basic judgement and common decency bordering on sociopathy.

SWIFTBOATING in NM-01, 2006

In the six months before the midterm, there were harsh, agressive, ads for the campaign in NM-01. It was almost enough to get me - a lifelong TV addict - to turn the box off. They were particularly bad in the last few weeks from an outfit called Americans for Honesty on Issues (AHI). This is one of three 527s funded by Bob Perry, the Houston housing contractor who bankrolled the Swiftboat effort of 2004. AHI was registered with the FEC on October 6, 2006, and ran on a single $2,000,000 donation from Perry, who turned out to have been the single largest contributor in the 2006 midterm elections. The only listed agent for AHI is Sue Walden, who’s mainly a player as a political fundraiser in Houston city politics. She’s also worked as a fundraiser for Tom Delay, a lobbyist for Enron (and loyal personal friend of Ken Lay & Jeffrey Skilling after their disgrace), and includes Karl Rove amongst her friends.

This part of the story has had little attention compared to the angles summarized above. This diary’s long enough already, so I’ll have to go into their meddling in NM-01 in another upcoming diary.

Here’s my guess though: Tom Delay had a lot of spare time on his hands over the summer, having resigned from the House and all. The two principals of AHI are reportedly his “friends”. It seems entirely possible that he had a hand in spending Perry’s millions through those three 527s. As it turns out, most of the most objectionable ads of the 2006 midterms all emanated from this same source. And in the case of NM-01, the circumstances look like they would have had there been obstruction of justice and flagrant violation of election laws banning coordination of efforts. Of course, I don’t know for sure, but that’s my suspicion. So keep an eye out for my next diary on this topic, which will focus on that aspect of the story.

TIME OUT FROM SCANDAL FOR PAJAMAS PETE

Meanwhile, Domenici will have some time out from the Iglesias scandal tomorrow, as he’ll be getting a Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service from the Smithsonian on Friday, March 16th with Sam Donaldson and Don Chalmers (who owns Albuquerque car dealerships) presiding.