One of the topics of my book Injustice are voter fraud deniers like the Brennan Center. They serve as an ideological smokescreen for verified criminal activity. I received this from an election lawyer today:
Yesterday the “nonpartisan” Brennan Center released a report (http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/voting_law_changes_in_2012) attacking state legislation to improve the integrity of the voting process, such as voter ID requirements. A perfect example of Brennan’s actual partisan bias appears in the report, which explicitly treats statements by Republicans as not credible and statements by Democrats as inherently authoritative. A passage on page 18 reads:
“Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, for example, claimed that up to 11,805 non-citizens were registered to vote in Colorado, while Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach claimed to have found 67 noncitizens illegally registered to vote in Kansas. These claims were hotly disputed, and they have since been debunked. [FN148] Nonetheless, Representative Gregg Harper (R-MS) called the finding “shocking,” and at a hearing he chaired on the topic, said, “[w]e simply cannot have an electoral system that allows thousands of non-citizens to violate the law and vote in our elections … [w]e must do more to protect the integrity of our electoral processes.””
So what do they mean when they say Secretary Gessler’s claims have been “debunked”? The footnote cited for that claim (FN148) says:
“See Keesha Gaskins, Smoke and Mirrors: Alleged Non-Citizen Voting in NM and CO, Brennan Center for Justice (Apr. 1, 2011), http://www.brennancenter.org/blog/archives/smoke_and_mirrors_alleged_non-citizen_voting_in_new_mexico_and_colorado/. Congressman Henry [sic] Gonzalez (D-TX) questioned Mr. Gessler’s claims, saying “No attorney would go before a judge with a report in which the main claims are preceded by such terms as ‘inconclusive’, ‘incomplete’, and ‘impossible to provide a precise number’ … ensuring the integrity of our elections is far too important a matter to base decisions on a study that mischaracterizes empirical data, neglects even the most obvious analysis of that data, and hides these failings behind terms like ‘tentative’ and ‘preliminary.’” Press Release, Kyle Anderson, Colorado Voter Registration Study Questioned during House Administration Hearing On a Look Back at What Went Right and Wrong with the 2010 Election (Apr. 1, 2011), available at http://democrats.cha.house.gov/press-release/colorado-voterregistration-study-questioned-during-house-administration-committee.”
There are two sources in that footnote. One is a post on Brennan’s own blog, which says of Secretary Gessler’s research: “Without the underlying reports and methodologies from New Mexico and Colorado, the conclusions cannot be fully supported or dismissed. With the information we have to date, for all the reasons stated above, any conclusions drawn from these two states must be scrutinized and cannot yet be taken at face value.” Hardly a scathing rebuttal. The other source is Representative Henry Gonzalez, a Democrat on the Committee on House Administration who attacked Secretary Gessler for being honest enough to state the limitations of his work — without offering any evidence the Colorado report was incorrect.
So a Democrat’s unsupported attacks are to be taken as both true and sufficient to counter the carefully described research of one Republican and the commentary on that research by another. “Nonpartisan” indeed.
Oh, and by the way – a credited contributor to the report is Myrna Perez, whose nomination to serve on the Election Assistance Commission is pending in the Senate.