From McClatchy:
Four days before the 2004 election, the Justice Departmentâs civil rights chief sent an unusual letter to a federal judge in Ohio who was weighing whether to let Republicans challenge the credentials of 23,000 mostly African-American voters.
The case was triggered by allegations that Republicans had sent a mass mailing to mostly Democratic-leaning minorities and used undeliverable letters to compile a list of voters potentially vulnerable to eligibility challenges.
In his letter to U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott of Cincinnati, Assistant Attorney General Alex Acosta argued that it would “undermine” the enforcement of state and federal election laws if citizens could not challenge votersâ credentials….
…Robert Kengle, former deputy chief of the departmentâs Voting Rights Section who served under Acosta, said the letter amounted to “cheerleading for the Republican defendants.”
“It was doubly outrageous,” he said, “because the allegation in the litigation was that these were overwhelmingly African-American voters that were on the challenge list.”
As McClatchy points out, Tim Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who went on to become U.S. attorney for Little Rock, was accused of being involved in precisely the same sort of thing back in 2004 while working for the RNC. More on that later.
