Mule Train Mail: Mark Crispin Miller on Sproul and Associates

EDITOR’S NOTE: These
Introductory Remarks were addressed by witness Mark Crispin Miller to the
Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law and the Subcommittee on Crime,
Terrorism and Homeland Security of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary during the May 14, 2008 Joint
Hearing on "Allegations of Selective Prosecution, Part II: The Erosion of Public
Confidence in Our Federal Justice System."

I am Mark
Crispin Miller, a professor at New York University and a longtime analyst of
media and politics. Lately my work has focused on the growing dangers of
election fraud and vote suppression in this country. My books include Fooled
Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform (2005), and, more recently,
Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy,
2000-2008.

I am not a Democrat or a Republican, but an Independent dedicated to the
promise of American democracy as envisioned by Tom Paine. I believe, with him,
that the right to vote is the basis on which all our other rights depend. And so
the issue here is ultimately not the victory or defeat of either party, but the
people’s right to choose their government, and thereby live, and rule, in
freedom.

Such was once the view of the US Justice Department, whose Voting Rights
Division strongly championed the individual right to vote, by prosecuting all
forms of illegal disfranchisement. Since 2001, however, the Department has
turned a blind eye toward illegal vote suppression.

Take the case of Sproul & Associates, an Arizona firm hired by the
Republican National Committee to run stealth voter registration drives
throughout the nation prior to the 2004 election. Starting in the summer,
Sproul’s troops haunted public areas, posing as non-partisan opinion pollsters
or petitioners for liberal causes. Through such deception, the firm worked to
inflate the number of registered Republicans, by any means necessary. Closely
following a script, the operatives asked leading questions-a form of "push
polling"-in order to identify Republican respondents, and then asked them
to fill out registration forms. The teams were orderd not to register
Democrats or Independents.

Nevertheless, many Democrats filled out the forms—and those forms were
destroyed. One Sproul worker in Las Vegas said: "We caught [my supervisor]
taking Democrats out of my pile, [and] hand[ing] them to her assistant, and he
ripped them up right in front of us."

More frequently, however, Sproul’s troops bamboozled thousands of Democrats
and Independents into registering as Republicans, either by secretly altering
the registration forms, or by misleading people into thus re-registering
themselves. Such service was expensive. According to their filings with the
Federal Election Commission, the Republican National Committee paid Sproul well
over $8 million—the RNC’s eighth-largest expenditure of the 2004 campaign.

And what did the party get for it? Aside from ripping up the registration
forms of many Democrats, the company created thousands of unwitting
faux-Republicans, in Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Pennsylvania, West Virginia,
Minnesota, Michigan and Oregon. Thanks to those inflated numbers, there appeared
to be more registered Republicans than there were in reality—a misimpression
that would seemingly explain the party’s upset wins in those states where the
exit polls predicted otherwise.

In Ohio, for example, countless Democratic votes were stolen through the
tactics documented in the full committee’s excellent report on the election
there: voter "caging," thwarted registration drives, broad refusal of
provisional ballots, organized disinformation and intimidation, shortages of
functioning machines in Democratic districts only, and numerous "machine
irregularities" undoing only Democratic votes. Those tactics were used also in
those other states where the exit polls predicted a Republican defeat—and where
Sproul had also helped inflate the number of grassroots Republicans.

Thus Sproul not only broke the law, but may also have assisted in a larger
plan to block the vote. (There are oddities, moreover, in the RNC’s filings with
the FEC, with nine expenditures, totaling well over $1 million, incurred somehow
in 2005, suggesting an attempt to minimize the sum spent on Sproul’s
services.)

And so Sproul & Associates clearly merited a full investigation; and yet
the DoJ did nothing. If there has been a federal probe of Sproul’s activities,
I’ve never heard of it. Far from coming under federal suspicion, Nathan Sproul,
the firm’s director, was invited to the Christmas party at the White House two
months after the election. And while the DoJ has winked at practices that
disenfranchise tens of thousands of Americans, that now wholly partisan
Department focuses obsessively on "voter fraud," which numbers in the tens.

Between 2002 and 2005, 24 people were convicted of illegal voting, with
another 62 convicted since. Those low numbers reconfirm the scholarly consensus
that "voter fraud" is actually quite rare. It is, in fact, a highly serviceable
myth, and/or delusion, that helps to justify the actual vote suppression, and
election fraud, that Sproul and others carry out to benefit their party.
Today the fantasy of "voter fraud" preoccupies the managers at Justice, and the
Supreme Court. It is therefore up to Congress to return us to reality, and
redirect this nation toward democracy.