Wise men don't piss into the wind!
Posted on 10/16/2010 6:13:33 AM PDT by Kaslin
Friday was a very bad day for the people responsible for the Keystone Kops operation protecting military voting rights inside the Justice Department. The three ranking members of the House of Representatives with oversight over military voting issues and the Justice Department sent a devastating letter to Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez. The curtain has been pulled back, and the DOJ spin that they are doing everything they can to protect military voters has become a laugh line.
Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith, Armed Service Committee Ranking Member Buck McKeon, and Elections Subcommittee Ranking Member Kevin McCarthy all joined forces to describe the clownish DOJ enforcement tactics in the letter. The problem for Eric Holder is that in just a few weeks, these three will probably shed the title “ranking member” and replace it with “chairman.”
Military ballots were required to be sent by September 18 under federal law. Some states, such as New York, received an extension to October 1. Despite these hard deadlines, nearly a third of states have failed to comply with the law. Military ballots have not been sent and in some cases this means our soldiers overseas are going to lose their right to vote. The public is beginning to see why.
“Public records” and media reports, like the many here at PJM, have “painted a picture of widespread noncompliance with federal law aided and abetted by an enforcement authority that is entirely ineffective,” the congressmen say. Strong stuff, that “aided and abetted” comparison, for it is a term mostly used to describe a criminal enterprise.
The laughs keep coming in the letter: “What we find most troubling about this situation” is that the DOJ “not only failed to ensure compliance but apparently” — get ready for it — “was not even aware when widespread noncompliance occurred.” Perhaps DOJ lawyers should bookmark PJM, because we were reporting on noncompliance days before they made their first calls into places like Illinois and Arkansas!
Here’s the best part: “The only way Members of Congress, the public” and the voters learned that ballots required to be mailed by September 18 hadn’t mailed is because “private organizations took it upon themselves to inquire” — emphasis added on inquire. What the congressmen are pointing out is that the DOJ never picked up the phone. It was the Military Voter Protection Project — an organization run by Lt. Commander (Res.) Eric Eversole that organizes teams of volunteer law students to do the DOJ’s job for them. These volunteers protected our soldiers for free, while bureaucrats in Washington making more than $140,000 a year dropped the ball. Eversole knows firsthand the ineptitude of the DOJ military voting rights management — he worked at the Voting Section and saw it firsthand.
So how did private citizens learn about violations of federal law in places like New Mexico, New York, Arkansas, and Illinois before the DOJ did? That’s where the story shifts from comic to tragic.
Simply, DOJ lawyers trusted informal emails from state election officials without firsthand knowledge that ballots had mailed. The emails came days after the deadline and didn’t even certify that the ballots mailed by the deadline. They only certified they had mailed.
Certified may be too strong a word. The three ranking members note they were “vague and misleading assertions of compliance.” For example, New York’s email message that “purportedly” certifies that all ballots were mailed by the deadline says only the ballots were “transmitted.” “That ‘certification’ includes no assurance that the reports it refers to are true, and does not even purport to state that the ballots were mailed by the October 1 deadline rather than the October 5 date of the email.”
The response of the DOJ lawyer to this motley “certification”?
“Thanks very much for the update,” he wrote back.
That’s it. Nothing else. Full stop.
It appears no call backs were made to the state. No calls were made to the county spot checking whether this was true. And the most amazing thing about this debacle is the person managing it allowed the exact same thing to happen in 2008 in Virginia.
You can read the affidavit from the military voting lawsuit in 2008 here. Except in 2008 the state election official that hoodwinked the DOJ was in Virginia. PJM reported on the 2008 Keystone Kops incident. The precise same thing has happened again in 2010, only the names have changed, and we warned you last July the Keystone Kops were returning for an encore.
If the Department of Justice were truly concerned about enforcement of military voting laws, it would examine whether Section 18 U.S.C. 1001 was violated. This law makes it a crime to lie to a federal official. Some units of the Civil Rights Division use this club to compel cooperation from targets of investigations. Let’s see if they are willing to use it to bolster the Department’s enforcement of military voting rights.
In the real world, when an employee makes a mission-critical error, such as implementing a system that yielded an enormous mission-critical failure in 2008, that employee is either terminated or told that a repeat is unacceptable. In the real world, when a second mission-critical failure occurs two years later, everyone knows the outcome.
But government isn’t the real world. Results don’t matter so much. Spin, redirection, posturing, and sometimes even lies follow mission critical mistakes. Consequences do not. This is especially true with the Eric Holder Justice Department.
Imagine the delivery man who keeps going back to the wrong store, or the waitress who screws up the orders night after night. We all know what happens. Or more to the point, what happened to Commander Christopher R. Van Metre who grounded the U.S.S. Hartford on a reef, or Air Force Captain Joseph Schweitzer when he flew his jet into a ski gondola in the Italian Alps? With our military, it is one and done.
“If the Department has routinely accepted ‘certifications’ like the one provided by New York – or apparently false assertions like the one provided by Illinois – then it is no surprise that compliance” with the mailing deadline “has been inconsistent at best,” the congressmen wrote.
The letter compares the selective enforcement of the law with the New Black Panther dismissal and the refusal to enforce the list maintenance provisions of Section 8 of Motor Voter, two items I testified and wrote extensively about here at PJM.
“Congress relies on the Department of Justice to ensure the laws are followed. The Department’s failure to give meaning to our efforts on behalf of overseas voters is deeply disappointing,” the letter concludes.
The letter speaks for millions of others who share the deep disappointment. On November 2, maybe disappointed Americans can find someone who wouldn’t otherwise vote and drag them to the polls to make up for servicemembers who have lost their right to vote this year.
Wise men don't piss into the wind!
It would be hard to think of a more poisonous and hateful administration.
I don’t suppose the fact that military voters tend to vote in large numbers for conservative and republican candidates might have anything to do w/the Holder crowd’s indifference. Nah. No chance. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Deeply disappointing fails to even scratch the surface of this cowardly act by an administration who’s apparent aim is to destroy this nation.
How can our troops accept this blatant attempt to deny them the very rights they are fighting for. That’s no COC in the White House, it’s a foreign agent bent on the destruction of America. Their oath is to the Constitution of this nation not to their enemies.
With all due respect to the author, it is not Keystone Kops.
The efforts of the DOJ are not clownish.
Their efforts constitute a deliberate attempt by the communist usurpers heading the DOJ to disenfranchise the military vote, which is overwhelmingly anti-communist.
> The problem for Eric Holder is that in just a few weeks,
> these three will probably shed the title “ranking member”
> and replace it with “chairman.”
Unfortunately, this is also incorrect.
If the elections go the way the polls indicate, the Republicans will not be chairing these committees until the Republican majority are seated in January 2011.
bttt
OK, so then why can’t overseas military bases print out .pdf forms of the ballots for their personnel to use, then mail those back?
Well, Repubs will not tolerate this. There will be much ado about this, loss of jobs, consequences will follow, right? Right? Huh?
+++++Not one race would be certified until military votes were counted, if I were in charge!!+++++
I’ll say it again. the anti american party was elected in 2008. come november we will see what percent is now willing to stand up and be american.
I wonder what the political leanings are of the election officials that have failed to get the military ballots mailed on time.
“It ain’t your America anymore.
Screw your stupid Constitution.
The only protections will be for illegal aliens,
terrorists, our secret police, and the Koran.”
Then ballots will be delivered on time and in abundance.
I just read that New York is allowing military and overseas voters to set up an email account as a way to deliver the ballot on time. And they have until the 15th of November to get them turned in, so for NY at least its mostly a matter of getting the individual military voters activated to deploy all these resources and do whatever it takes to join the forthcoming Battle of the Ballot, November 2010, perhaps the most critical engagement in American military history.
To our military brothers and sisters I say this: We need you now, we need you here, more than ever. Get er done, people. We are counting on you.
I wonder if the New York Sec. of state was told that he could be held in contempt or some other charges come January after the Republicans take over and face Jail time if it was found he Intentionally waited to send ballots to soldiers.
Hmmmm...
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