Outside looking in

Just as Knight-Ridder beat The Times and The Post to uncovering the fraudulence of the administration's Iraq claims before the war, McClatchy newspapers (which recently merged Washington bureaus with KR) was the first news source to document the unfolding of U.S. attorneys scandal.

The current scandal swirling around the firing of eight U.S. attorneys first reached the mainstream media in a major way via a report from McClatchy Newspapers' Washington, D.C., bureau. That scoop had been fed by items that had appeared for weeks on political blogs. How is it that the resource-rich Washington Post and New York Times did not break the "AttorneyGate" story above ground?

One reason was that McClatchy's Marisa Taylor had only worked inside the Beltway for less than a year and had brought with her years of experience covering federal courts in distant parts of the country.

"It helped still being an outsider here," Taylor, 37, told me, with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales facing the possible loss of his own job. "And as a bureau we are underdogs in terms of resources, and that can sometimes help us. It encourages us to maybe look outside the Beltway. We were willing to believe the Justice Department if it provided evidence that this was not political, but also willing to look at other explanations. We were willing to be a watchdog."

So that's how this whole newspaperin' thing is supposed to work Who knew?

And because she had worked for local papers before going to Washington, she was attuned to just how suspicious this looks, as local authorities are always leery of federal prosecutors bringing corruption cases motivated by Washington politics.

Via TPM, which is also given props in the article.

Meanwhile, those prosecutors fired for failing to bring voter fraud cases (against democratic voters), well, the plot thickened considerably.

A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by The New York Times.

Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate.

The revised version echoes complaints made by Republican politicians, who have long suggested that voter fraud is widespread and justifies the voter identification laws that have been passed in at least two dozen states.

Democrats say the threat is overstated and have opposed voter identification laws, which they say disenfranchise the poor, members of minority groups and the elderly, who are less likely to have photo IDs and are more likely to be Democrats.

Though the original report said that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud,” the final version of the report released to the public concluded in its executive summary that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.”

The topic of voter fraud, usually defined as people misrepresenting themselves at the polls or improperly attempting to register voters, remains a lively division between the two parties. It has played a significant role in the current Congressional investigation into the Bush administration’s firing of eight United States attorneys, several of whom, documents now indicate, were dismissed for being insufficiently aggressive in pursuing voter fraud cases.

The report also addressed intimidation, which Democrats see as a more pervasive problem.

And two weeks ago, the panel faced criticism for refusing to release another report it commissioned concerning voter identification laws. That report, which was released after intense pressure from Congress, found that voter identification laws designed to fight fraud can reduce turnout, particularly among members of minorities. In releasing that report, which was conducted by a different set of scholars, the commission declined to endorse its findings, citing methodological concerns.

A number of election law experts, based on their own research, have concluded that the accusations regarding widespread fraud are unjustified. And in this case, one of the two experts hired to do the report was Job Serebrov, a Republican elections lawyer from Arkansas, who defended his research in an e-mail message obtained by The Times that was sent last October to Margaret Sims, a commission staff member.

“Tova and I worked hard to produce a correct, accurate and truthful report,” Mr. Serebrov wrote, referring to Tova Wang, a voting expert with liberal leanings from the Century Foundation and co-author of the report. “I could care less that the results are not what the more conservative members of my party wanted.”

He added: “Neither one of us was willing to conform results for political expediency.”

For contractual reasons, neither Ms. Wang nor Mr. Serebrov were at liberty to comment on their original report and the discrepancies with the final, edited version.

The original report on fraud cites “evidence of some continued outright intimidation and suppression” of voters by local officials, especially in some American Indian communities, while the final report says only that voter “intimidation is also a topic of some debate because there is little agreement concerning what constitutes actionable voter intimidation.”

The original report said most experts believe that “false registration forms have not resulted in polling place fraud,” but the final report cites “registration drives by nongovernmental groups as a source of fraud.”

This is important -- the GOP and Karl Rove's strategy for "a permanent Republican majority" had as one tactic an attempt to intimidate voters at the local level, and maybe The Times is starting to connect dots.

The Republican Party’s interest in rooting out voter fraud has been encouraged by the White House. In a speech last April, Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s senior political adviser, told a group of Republican lawyers that election integrity issues were an “enormous and growing” problem.

“We’re, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses,” Mr. Rove said. “I mean, it’s a real problem.”