One of my first introductions to how aggressively the post-2000 Rove GOP was going to use bogus ‘vote fraud’ stories to stop minorities from being able to vote came in the extremely close South Dakota senate race back in 2002. That was when Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD) barely squeaked out a victory over Jon Thune (R). Thune, of course, came back two years later and defeated South Dakota’s senior senator and then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D). If you go back and look through the TPM Search for ‘South Dakota Fraud’ you’ll find a decent cross section of the reporting and writing I did on the subject in the spring and summer of 2002.
It was a riveting and also profoundly disgusting story. The whole rightwing noise machine from Sioux Falls to the Journal OpEd page spreading tales about the rampant vote fraud on the state’s Indian reservations. For folks more familiar with how this stuff works in the South it was reminiscent of something from early in the 20th century or late in the 19th. And the aftermath was a lot like the cases we’ve learned about in the aftermath of the Attorney Purge. Lots of lurid stories and in the end usually it’s left to some reasonably honest Republican officeholder to scrutinize the whole thing and have to announce that all the stories were bogus.
In any case, I mention all this because the LA Times has a good article out this evening explaining one of the key reasons that former Minnesota US Attorney Thomas Heffelfinger ended up on the firing list: took too strong a stand in favor of protecting the voting rights of the state’s sizeable Native American population.
The state’s Republican Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer wanted to use her office to crack down on Native American voting. But apparently Heffelfinger wouldn’t play ball.
Remember the Rove/Gonzales motto: Just because there’s a 15th Amendment doesn’t mean we have to take it lying down.
