How Republicans planned to rig elections as more states banned touch-screen voting

I'll say this much for the bunch of criminals in the White House. They prove that George Bush revealed much about how his Administration works on August 5, 2004 when he said:

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

Nor do they ever stop thinking about new ways to disenfranchise those voters they believe most likely to vote Democratic:

For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Department of Justice political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.

The administration intensified its efforts last year as President George W. Bush’s popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.

Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy last April when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Questions about the administration’s campaign against alleged voter fraud have helped fuel the political tempest over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom were ousted in part because they failed to bring voter fraud cases important to Republican politicians.

Civil rights advocates charge the administration’s policies were intended to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters who tend to support Democrats. By filing state and federal lawsuits, civil rights groups have won court rulings blocking some of its actions.

[snip[

Since President Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft, a former Republican senator from Missouri, launched a “Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Initiative” in 2001, justice department political appointees have exhorted U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases and the department’s Civil Rights Division has sought to roll back policies to protect minority voting rights.

On virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting since 2001, the division’s Voting Rights Section has come down on the side of Republicans, notably in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Washington and other states where recent elections have been decided by narrow margins.

Joseph Rich, who left his job as chief of the section in 2005, said these events formed an unmistakable pattern.

“As more information becomes available about the administration’s priority on combating alleged, but not well-substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens,” he said.

When the problems of touch-screen voting began finally to enter the public consciousness, this adminstration took the term "vote fraud", which widely meant deliberately tossed votes and voting machines that flipped votes as part of their inner workings, and added an "r" to it and made it "voter fraud", which allowed them to zero in on those most likely to vote against them and least likely to kick up a fuss about it.