Posted October 20, 2008 by J. Gerald Hebert

Campaign Justice?

The following entry appeared on The Hill's Congress Blog today. 

Six weeks ago, the Justice Department invited my organization and a number of other groups to a meeting to discuss law enforcement priorities during this election season.  We were surprised to be ushered into an auditorium where we were addressed by U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey who finished his remarks and promptly left for a press conference elsewhere at DOJ to tout his meeting with our organizations.   The format was not conducive to any meaningful discussion of the issues and largely proved to be a wasted opportunity for a healthy dialogue.  Despite the fact that our organizations were seemingly utilized as props, the meeting did produce a statement from Attorney General Mukasey that the Department was committed to making election protection its highest priority. 

Despite these assurances, neither Mukasey nor any other high ranking official at DOJ has issued any kind of statement affirming DOJ’s intention to investigate and enforce the federal civil rights statutes that prohibit minority voter suppression schemes, such as racially motivated caging and voter intimidation.  On October 26, two weeks ago, numerous civil rights groups and other organizations like the Campaign Legal Center met with Acting Assistant Attorney General Grace Chung Becker urging that such a statement be issued.  I personally attended that meeting and felt afterwards that Ms. Becker was genuinely supportive of the Department issuing such a pronouncement.  She promised to look into it immediately.  Maybe she did so and got the cold shoulder. 

In any event, since that time, the only statement coming out of DOJ was an FBI leak that the Department had opened a voter fraud investigation of the community group ACORN.  Such a leak not only violates Department policy, but the mere public acknowledgement of any investigation of voter fraud is itself at odds with DOJ Federal Prosecution of Election offenses policy:  “[I]n most cases voters should not be interviewed, or other voter-related investigation done, until after the election is over. Such overt investigative steps may chill legitimate voting activities.  They are also likely to be perceived by voters and candidates as an intrusion into the election.  Indeed, the fact of a federal criminal investigation may itself become an issue in the election.”  

Time is running out on AG Mukasey and other Department officials to make clear that the partisan abuses at DOJ that marked their 2004 and 2006 activities around Election Day are over.  Their failure to issue any public statement that they will aggressively investigate and prosecute voter intimidation and vote suppression schemes that surface in the upcoming election is deeply disappointing.  With the election now just two weeks away, late last week the Campaign Legal Center and many other organizations sent a letter (http://www.campaignlegalcenter.org/press-3422.html) to AG Mukasey urging him to act immediately to protect voters from discriminatory interference in their right to participate in this election.   Silence about protecting the right to vote is simply not acceptable. 

J. Gerald Hebert is Executive Director of the Campaign Legal Center.  He spent more than two decades in the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division.