After dancing around a laundry list of issues, the cause behind the firing of the eight US attorneys has come back again and again to a single issue: the Republican obsession with voter fraud conspiracies. Today's NYT article focuses on the case of David Iglesias.

State Republican leaders demanded a criminal investigation. And with the television cameras rolling, the United States attorney, David C. Iglesias, a boyish-looking Republican, promised a thorough one...The inquiry he began, however, never resulted in charges, so frustrating Republican officials here that they began an extraordinary campaign to get rid of him that reached all the way to President Bush.

What was the nature of the complaints? A voter-registration group, ACORN, had paid workers to register voters. Rather than paying a simple hourly rate, ACORN had paid, in part, by the number of names produced. Not surprisingly, this resulted in some workers getting the brilliant idea of drawing their names from the phone book. In Missouri, other ACORN workers registered dead relatives, pets, and an array of characters from films and even cartoons.

In both states, Republicans seized on these registration follies as incidents of massive voter fraud. ACORN became "Democratic operatives," and every twelve-year-old and animated dog scribbled down on a page sent back to ACORN was trumpeted as further evidence of an attempt by Democrats to subvert the election. When Iglesias, and other US attorneys, failed to validate this great central tenet of Republican mythology -- that Democrats are out to stuff the ballot boxes -- the hue and cry went out for his dismissal.

Ignored in all this is that there has never been any evidence that a single one of these false registrations appears to have been made for the purpose of casting an illegal vote.

Mr. Iglesisas said, prosecutors would have had to prove that the [ACORN registrar], who had been fired for other reasons, had falsified the applications with the intent of influencing the election. Mr. Iglesias said "it appeared she was just doing it for the money."

The great majority of such false registrations never reach the rolls, because states have mechanisms in place to filter out just such false registrations.

No evidence has ever been presented that these registrations have ever been the cause of any illegal votes.

Someone walking into a polling place and claiming to be Daffy Duck is likely to be met with a bit of skepticism, and a pre-pubescent waving a registration card will get nothing but a pat on the head -- which makes all these false registrations of highly questionable value

But if these false registrations don't lead to false votes, and don't affect elections one whit, why do Republicans bring them up again and again? What makes this political urban legend worth firing US attorneys? Why would they rather see Alberto Gonzales' neck on the chopping block than give up this favorite belief?

Because they need it. Without the false flag of voter fraud, Republicans would have no cover for their own extremely direct and well-documented efforts in voter suppression. They want to keep groups like ACORN from registering thousands of minority voters, so what better way than to show that a handful of workers for these groups have engaged in "fraud?" They want to justify restrictions that would make it much harder for people to vote. How can they do this unless they generate evidence that such restrictions are required?

To see how Republicans use these examples as means for supporting their argument, take a look at this editorial from the Utah Deseret News.

Several years ago, newspaper investigations found that people were using mail-in forms to register names they had invented out of thin air, or even their dogs and cats, all so they could obtain absentee ballots and vote more than once. The student paper at Marquette University surveyed 1,000 students and found that 174 willingly admitted to voting at least twice, thanks to Wisconsin's lax registration laws.

Notice that the first group of incidents, the "people using mail-in forms," has no specifics, no way to check whether there's any truth in the statement. And notice that the editorial makes the leap from false registration to intent to cast a fraudulent vote, without even stopping for breath, much less evidence.

The second accusation, that of the multiple votes by students at Marquette, seems more precise. The trouble is, the editorial was written in 2006. The supposed incident mentioned occurred in 2000. So did this article.

A Marquette University student backed down Wednesday from earlier claims that he voted four times in the presidential election, while local officials investigating claims of widespread voter fraud among Marquette students began to publicly question those claims.

As more investigations were made, it became clear that the story was entirely a fabrication. Not only that, it was fabricated intentionally.

In the statement, Bosworth said he was trying to express his belief that there was a high potential for voter fraud and did so "by overstating his position."

Every investigation -- including investigations by the local district attorney -- found no evidence of any actual voter fraud. The incident at Marquette was part of a number of Republican efforts to generate controversy in Wisconsin in 2000. Why? Because they needed a counter story to signs of clear voter suppression elsewhere, including in Florida. As the drama in Florida unfolded, Republicans invented incident by incident in Wisconsin, all in an effort to distract the press and drum up righteous indignation. Six years later, this utterly disproven incident is still being used in an editorial to defend the polls from "voter fraud." In fact, the "fraud at Marquette," has become one of those events enshrined in Republican mythology.

Sacrificing the US attorneys to sustain the voter fraud story may end the career of Alberto Gonzales, and seeing Gonzo trotted out of town may generate some visceral satisfaction. But keep this in mind: Gonzales will surely be leaving only to take some seven-figure position at a Republican law firm. He'll spend the rest of his life sipping champagne based on the contributions he's made to obscuring truth and perverting justice. Gonzales is not important. If the Republicans exit this affair without losing the curtain of voter fraud that they've been able to drape over every effort for voter suppression since the first days of the civil rights movement, they'll come out of this the winners.

Update [2007-3-18 14:23:40 by Devilstower]: I should have mentioned this earlier, but if you haven't already read Land of Enchantment's excellent diary on the circumstances in New Mexico, do so. Very nice work.