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The Justice Department issued a directive to every US attorney in the country to find and prosecute cases of voter fraud during the height of hotly contested elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006, even though evidence of such abuses was extremely thin or non-existent, according to a former federal prosecutor.

David Iglesias, the former US attorney for New Mexico, recalled receiving an email in late summer 2002 from the Department of Justice suggesting "in no uncertain terms" that US attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials "to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases," Iglesias wrote in his recently published memoir, In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a grassroots group that has registered hundreds of thousands of new voters, was one of the Justice Department's targets. In recent weeks, ACORN has become the target of Republican attacks over claims the organization is involved in a nationwide voter registration fraud scheme.

Trying to salvage his campaign, John McCain last week declared ACORN "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

Iglesias was fired in 2006 after he refused to prosecute what turned out to be unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud leveled against ACORN.

In his book, Iglesias recounted how the Department of Justice aggressively pushed him and other US attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, an issue the former US attorney says the DOJ became unusually obsessed with.

"The e-mail imperatives came again in 2004 and 2006, by which time I had learned that far from being standard operating procedure for the Justice Department, the emphasis on voter irregularities was unique to the Bush administration," Iglesias wrote.

Iglesias says that Republican officials in his state were far less interested in election reforms and more intent on suppressing votes.

"But there was a more sinister reading to such urgent calls for reform, not to mention the Justice Department's strident insistence on harvesting a bumper crop of voter fraud prosecutions."

"Not only did the [Bush] administration stoop to such seamy expedients to press its agenda in 2004," Iglesias wrote. "It had the full might and authority of the federal government and its prosecutorial powers to accomplish its ends."

Last week, New Mexico Republican officials continued to press claims of voter fraud in the state.

The New Mexico Republican Party publicly announced the identity of 28 people suspected of casting fraudulent votes in the June Democratic primary. State Republican Party officials claimed the ballots in question had inaccurate social security numbers and wrong birth dates. 

In a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey Monday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers criticized the New Mexico GOP for disseminating the names of the voters claiming "it was a clear effort to intimidate voters."

The state's Republican Party claims it discovered the problems during a review of 92 newly registered voters in one district.

Pat Rogers, an attorney who works closely with the state's Republican Party, said the suspect ballots were turned over to the state attorney general's office and the Bernalillo County district attorney.

Rogers, it turns out, has a history of lodging complaints against Democrats and organizations such as ACORN claiming voter fraud and other election irregularities.

According to a report by the Justice Department's inspector general, "Patrick Rogers, the former general counsel to the New Mexico state Republican Party and a party activist, continued [before the 2006 election] to complain about voter fraud issues in New Mexico.

"In a March 2006 e-mail forwarded to [Craig] Donsanto in the [Justice Department's] Public Integrity Section, Rogers complained about voter fraud in New Mexico and added, 'I have calls in, to the USA [U.S. Attorney] and his main assistant, but they were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle last election."

Donsanto is the author of the updated May 2007 Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses manual that softened the warnings about investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases before an election. Last week, according to an Associated Press report, the FBI launched an investigation into claims by Republican operatives that ACORN has been involved in a massive voter registration fraud scheme.

Rogers told The Public Record after the release of the Justice Department report on the U.S. Attorney firings that the "the DOJ report is erroneous is so many ways it is not possible to address them all." 

But the Justice Department report concluded that Rogers played a role in pressuring Iglesias's office to prosecute ACORN for voter fraud.

In June 2006, Rogers sent Iglesias's Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Rumaldo Armijo an e-mail:

"The voter fraud wars continue. Any indictment of the Acorn woman would be appreciated. . . . The ACLU/Wortheim [sic] democrats will turn to the camera and suggest fraud is not an issue, because the USA would have done something by now. Carpe Diem!"

John Wertheim was then chairman of the New Mexico Democratic Party.

The effort apparently paid off as registration rolls in the county increased by about 65,000 newly registered voters.

Mary Herrera, the Bernalillo County clerk, told White that there were about 3,000 or so forms that were either incomplete or incorrectly filled out.

White seized upon the registration forms as evidence that ACORN submitted fraudulent registration forms and held a press conference along with other Republican officials in the county to call attention to the matter.

In 2004, Iglesias established an election fraud task force and spent more than two months probing Rogers and other GOP officials' claims of widespread voter fraud in his state.

"After examining the evidence, and in conjunction with the Justice Department Election Crimes Unit and the FBI, I could not find any cases I could prosecute beyond a reasonable doubt," Iglesias told the Senate committee last week. "Accordingly, I did not authorize any voter fraud-related prosecutions."

In testimony before a Senate committee last year, Iglesias said the task force received about 108 complaints of alleged voter fraud through a hotline over the course of about eight weeks.

"Most of the complaints made to the hotline were clearly not prosecutable-citizens would complain of their yard signs being removed from their property and de minimis matters like that," Iglesias testified before the Senate committee. "Only one case of the over 100 referrals had potential. ACORN had employed a woman to register voters. The evidence showed she registered voters who did not have the legal right to vote.

"The law, 42 USC 1973, had the maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $5000 fine. After personally reviewing the FBI investigative report and speaking to the agent, the prosecutor I had assigned, Mr. [Rumaldo] Armijo, and conferring with [a Justice Department official] I was of the opinion that the case was not provable. I, therefore, did not authorize a prosecution. I have subsequently learned that the State of New Mexico did not file any criminal cases as a result of the" election fraud task force."

Rogers recent claims of voter fraud in New Mexico, however, have not held up. Earlier Monday, ACORN officials told reporters that election officials in New Mexico determined that the 28 people whose votes were called into question did not cast fraudulent votes.

One of the voters, 18-year-old Brittany Rivera, attended an ACORN news conference and said she was scared when Republican Party officials identified her a "fraudulent" voter.

Rivera said she is now "more determined" to vote having been wrongfully targeted by the GOP. 

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