UC Irvine law professor Rick Hasen says this development, which he describes as coming from the “Irony Dept”, is just “too delicious”.
Leslie Rutledge, the Republican candidate for Attorney General in Arkansas, has been discovered to have been registered to vote in multiple states in addition to Arkansas, and even voted by absentee ballot in Arkansas’ general election in November of 2008 — after she had registered to vote in Washington D.C. [PDF] in July of the same year.
According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Rutledge has now been removed from Arkansas’ voting rolls by the Pulaski County Clerk, after he confirmed that she was registered to vote in D.C., and possibly Virginia. The removal from the rolls may also lead to her ineligibility to be elected to office.
Rutledge’s Arkansas absentee ballot request form for the 2008 general election is here [PDF]. And, indeed, her subsequent voter registration form from Virginia is here [PDF].
“For the AG candidate of the party who likes to scream about voter fraud to be registered in two (or three) places at once is ironic and amusing on its own,” writes Matt Campbell of Arkansas’ “Blue Hog Report”, which was on this story from the jump.
“However, the bigger implication is Article 19, section 3, of the Arkansas Constitution,” he adds, which states: “No persons shall be elected to, or appointed to fill a vacancy in, any office who does not possess the qualifications of an elector.” If Rutledge is not registered in Arkansas, she no longer “possess[es] the qualifications of an elector.”
But, believe it or not, none of that is the actual ironic part that Hasen was referring to in his piece on this today. Yes, it gets even more ironic!…
The Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) is furious that Rutledge has now been removed from the voting rolls.
The RNLA is the rightwing group which has, for years, been at the forefront of pretending there is massive voter fraud going on, and pushing for disenfranchising polling place Photo ID restrictions and supporting mass voter registration roll purges by Republican officials, even if the purges take place inside the 90 days before a federal election when systematic purges are supposed to be in violation of the federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
It was at an RNLA gathering in 2006, where then George W. Bush’s White House political director Karl Rove spoke and thanked the gathered attorneys for their “work on clean elections” in recent years.
“I know a lot of you spent time in the 2004 election, the 2002, election, the 2000 election in your communities or in strange counties in Florida, helping make it certain that we had the fair and legitimate outcome of the election,” Rove said at the time, before going on to, ironically enough, compare U.S. elections to “those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses.”
While the RNLA has gone to court defending mass pre-election purges in years past, now they are flipping that script to pretend that the removal of Rutledge from the rolls by Pulaski’s Democratic County Clerk Larry Crane amounts to a “systematic” purge, “almost certainly in violation of federal law”.
“Having served on a state election board, I know that one of the most fundamental rules is that under the National Voter Registration Act voters cannot be systematically removed from voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election,” says RNLA Chairman J. Randy Evans in a statement today. “Yet, that is exactly what the Democrats have done in Arkansas.”
“The fact is that it is a clear and unmistakable attempt at the most harmful kind of voter suppression in violation of federal law — removing a qualified female voter from the rolls notwithstanding her valid registration and actual votes in the last 4 elections in violation of her civil rights. Democrats should be embarrassed,” Evans railed.
Election law expert Hasen responds to the RNLA’s statement to note that “Usually it is Democrats fighting a last minute voter purge under the NVRA.”
“My understanding of these provisions is not deep,” he adds, “but my impression is that the NVRA only stops large, wholesale voter purges and not the individual removal of ineligible rolls for particular reasons.”
That is our understanding of the law as well. Though that has not stopped folks like Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott from attempting to carry out huge registration roll purges just prior to elections, as he attempted in 2012. At the time, Scott attempted to claim that while wholesale purges might be in violation of federal law, the same statutes also required the removal of specific voters when the state learned of information to demonstrate that the voters were ineligible.
Scott and his hand-picked Sec. of State Ken Detzner were hoping to remove thousands of alleged “non-citizens” from the rolls based on entirely faulty information. Luckily, they were stopped from doing so.
In this case, of course, the removal of a single voter — who also happens to be a candidate for statewide office — was done only after the County Clerk confirmed her registration elsewhere, and that she had voted in Arkansas even after that new registration.
We haven’t yet looked too deeply into the details here, and whether or not Rutledge and the Republicans have a case here or not. Campbell at Blue Hog Report has much more on the legal contours in question as well as the timelines of her various residencies, registrations and/or lies about them “under penalty of perjury”. The RNLA — an extraordinarily partisan group which has demonstrated a propensity for simply making shit up over the years — claims that Rutledge “renewed her voter registration and voted in Arkansas after no longer residing in Washington, DC.”
Whether she was actually “no longer residing in Washington, DC” when she voted by absentee ballot back in Arkansas in 2008 seems to be at the core of the issue. She claims that she legally re-registered back in Arkansas in March of 2013. While that hardly makes her November 2008 absentee vote legal, it would, if true, raise questions about her removal from the rolls this week in Arkansas.
In any case, the RNLA (for some strange reason) seems to be focusing less on whether she was legally registered in the past, and more on whether she has been inappropriately removed from the rolls by the Pulaski County Clerk who, both she and the RNLA charge, violated the law himself by both removing her from the rolls and by not informing her previous jurisdiction when she re-registered in Arkansas earlier this year. Or something.
The irony in all of this — particularly about a group which has long claimed that voting rolls are a mess (they sometimes are, since people move and have a habit of dying), charging that Democrats purposely refuse to clean them up and remove voters after they have died or registered elsewhere because they are hoping to encourage massive “voter fraud” (a wholly unsupported claim) — is far above our pay-grade to adequately express.
So, we’ll let Rutledge do that for us. Here’s part of a written statement she released this morning:
…
Taking a person’s right to vote away from them, as Democrat Larry Crane has done, is reprehensible and a desperate attempt to help the campaign of a Democratic candidate who lacks the experience and good judgment to protect the citizens of our great state. Who will Mr. Crane target next? Will Mr. Crane and his Democratic cronies now manipulate the voter file to remove more qualified Republican voters from the role?
…
This is a case of big bureaucrat, big government, crooked politics interfering with a basic American right. … Mr. Crane should be ashamed for using partisan politics to disenfranchise a voter in an attempt to hijack an election.
…
Arkansas needs an Attorney General willing to stand up and fight when government treads on their rights and that’s exactly what I will do when elected. Taking a person’s right to vote away from them, as Democrat Larry Crane has done, is reprehensible and a desperate attempt help [sic] the campaign of a Democratic candidate…
If you’ve been reading The BRAD BLOG for any amount of time, your head has, by now, exploded and/or you certainly appreciate the insane irony in both her outrage, and that of the RNLA here.
But, if you haven’t been reading us for long enough to appreciate all of that, perhaps her statement on polling place Photo ID restrictions earlier this year will do the trick. Such measures have been long sought by Republicans across the country, despite the virtual non-existence of the type of fraud that could even possibly be deterred by such measures. Arkansas Republicans’ own version of polling place Photo ID restrictions were recently struck down as a violation of the state’s constitution (though the legal battles over that statute in both state and federal courts continue.)
You’ll be shocked to learn that Rutledge is an ardent supporter of such restrictions on the right to vote by legally registered voters, despite the total lack of “voter fraud” that its proponents are able to show that it might deter, and the enormous number of voters that its detractors have repeatedly and specifically identified as likely to be disenfranchised under such laws.
“As AG,” Rutledge boldly declared on her Facebook page in May, before her own potential voter fraud was brought to light, “I’ll defend voter ID laws to protect the integrity of our elections.”
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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I wonder if as an ATTORNEY she might also have violated professional ethics by knowingly being registered in multiple jurisdictions at the same time. I would think that would bring into question her qualifications to be the State’s number one Attorney being a potential felon and all?
The irony here is indeed delicious, and is especially enriched by the contrast of Ms. Rutledge responding to modest enforcement of the voter registration statutes with the sort of screeching, bogus complaints of in-person Democratic voter fraud that are GOP stock in trade these days. This, versus the sort of voter (and possibly tax?) fraud of the mobile, multiple home-owing elites (like Ann Coulter), that Rutledge in fact appears guilty of perpetrating.
Tastier still will be if her fraud results, as it appears it should, in her AG candidacy being revoked. It certainly should be the case that potential felons should not hold the post of AG – something a lawyer really should know, as a lawyer should also know and understand the legal forms and their proper (or improper) uses.
Typical republican getting caught in possible fraud blame Chicago politics to try to pass the blame of their whole United States voter fraud. The American people have been dumbed down to even thinking of voting republican.
Name one thing the republicans have done in six years to help our country to get jobs? What have they done to better the middle class?
StumptownHero said @ 1:
I don’t think there’s any requirement for a voter to notify the last location in which they were registered that they’d like to be removed from the rolls when registering elsewhere. Not to my knowledge, anyway.
However, for an attorney — much less one who is running to be the state’s legal chief! — to not know that voting somewhere that you don’t live, especially after you have registered to vote elsewhere, is illegal, strains credulity, to say the least.
There is also the matter of her blatantly lying, under penalty of perjury, about her residences on several of those documents (see the docs here [PDF], and see Blue Hog Report’s documentation of the lies here.)
Of course, Ann Coulter was an attorney as well before she too lied, under penalty of committing a felony in the state of Florida, on her voter registration docs too! So I guess both voter registration fraud and voter fraud is something Republican attorneys do quite a bit! Go figure.
This is getting picked up by MSM. Salon linked you.
Does it ever get annoying to be frequently 2-3 days (or in the case of Don Siegelman, 2 or 3 years…or in the case of voting machines, 2 or 3 election cycles) ahead of the curve and then see the mainstreamers write (or link) your story like they just discovered it?
KD5 said @5:
They didn’t link me. That’s my actual story. (The same one published above, with a few minor tweeks made by their editor for publication today.)
Heheh…well, that has been a continuing frustration over the years, but one I’ve ultimately learned to simply accept. Sometimes, of course, they never pick up the story. Other times they finally do, but credit others for it. Again, have leanred to accept it.
The only place where it remains frustrating is that often times I’ll pitch these stories to other outlets very early, because, essentially, I do nothing but lose money at The BRAD BLOG. Unfortunately, very few people donate here, so my only hope is to try to sell freelance pieces elsewhere to help make up for the lost money here, so that I can simply keep going — because I think it’s important that many of these stories see the light of day!
The frustrating part then comes with the fact that so often stories will be rejected until someone else runs them. In other words, many mainstream outlets are afraid to touch stories until they see another mainstream outlet run them. That’s often why you see so many outlets running stories on the same issue all at once, particularly when the story is seen to be controversial or dangerous in any way.
That part is very frustrating because it means that, due to cowardice of the mainstream, many very important stories never see the light of day. Or, if they do, it’s far too late to do anything about them. So, yeah…that continues to be a regular frustration around here. Stuff that could be headed off at the pass isn’t, until after damage is done.
Oh my God the invocation of “Chicago-style” politics in her quote says it all. Does that mean with mustard and relish? “Chicago-style” is a synonym for Dem corruption that is dying with us Baby Boomer geezers as a cultural touchstone, though the GOP would love to keep it alive as their pathetic “THEY do it too!” beard for their egregious election steals starting with the 2000 presidential. I’m remembering Max Cleland’s horrible “defeat” by all-electronic machines in Georgia (the year Wellstone, wife, and a son, I believe, were all killed when their small plane crashed without a trace of wreckage – looked like someone had put out a cigarette on the ground). The Senate may well be decided in Georgia this year – on the same paperless e-machines. Chicago-style politics, boo-hoo. The GOP is full of what gimlet-eyed social critic/novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald called, in The Great Gatsby, “careless people.” Literally – they don’t care about much except themselves and their friends, and how they’re doing. The rest of the people they’re supposedly seeking to govern can sicken and die – as Alan Grayson characterized them thinking, according to the GOP ‘health plan’ – the sooner the better.