Monday, April 16, 2007

Rove’s Voter Fraud Fictions

The Opinionator

On Sunday, The New York Times Editorial page examined “The Fantasy Behind the Scandal”: “the Bush administration’s campaign to transform the minor problem of voter fraud into a supposed national scourge.” Joshua Green, a senior editor at The Atlantic who profiled Karl Rove in 2004, fingers Rove as the man behind “the White House’s seemingly odd fixation.” Green observes that Rove has long seen “the issue of voter fraud as a handy political weapon at election time.” In an online column, Green writes:


The closest race of Rove’s career—the 1994 election for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in which Rove’s candidate actually trailed the morning after the election—hinged on the issue of voter fraud. As I discovered from Rove’s own staff while doing a profile of him in 2004, Rove himself pushed the voter fraud issue aggressively and ultimately won the race.



Green adds, “What I remember most from reporting this piece three years ago are the vivid, and largely fictional, tales that Rove peddled to help keep his candidate’s hopes alive.”

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