CHARGE: JUSTICE DEPARTMENT PUT PARTISAN PRESSURE ON ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION

WP: Panel Faces Partisanship Allegations
By Zachary A. Goldfarb
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, June 22, 2007

In late 2003, the first four commissioners of the newly formed, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission were given a tall order: Help states overhaul their election procedures so that the acrimony that followed the contested 2000 presidential election would not be repeated....But, three years later, as it prepares for its second presidential election, the agency is facing far more serious problems: inquiries over a rash of allegations of partisan decision making....

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Activist groups have raised questions about whether, in response to pressure from the Justice Department, the commission altered or delayed research to play down findings on sensitive topics such as voter fraud and voter identification laws that many Republican figures and appointees would have found objectionable.

"There has been increasing evidence of improper attempts to exert political pressure on the EAC to influence the agency's decisions on election-related matters," said Wendy Weiser, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the liberal Brennan Center of Justice at New York University School of Law, who has reviewed thousands of pages of the commission's internal documents....

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The most recent controversy stemmed from last summer, when two reports were prepared for the agency, one about voter fraud and intimidation, the other about voter identification laws. But they did not see the light of day for several months.

Facing multiple open-records requests, the panel released its voter intimidation and fraud report in December. The report said that "there is a great deal of debate" about the topic. Later, it was revealed that the original report had been changed; it had said that voter fraud was virtually nonexistent. Commissioners say the original report went too far in reaching its conclusions about voter fraud....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/21/AR2007062102103.html?hpid=sec-politics

and nowhere else we've seen?

& :kick:d

activities of the Gonzales DOJ is beginning to become a steady stream.