As if Diebold’s crooked business practices isn’t enough of a threat to our
voting rights and the basis of our democracy, we now learn that the Justice
Department is also posing a harsh threat:

The Justice Department has barred staff attorneys from offering
recommendations in major Voting Rights Act cases, marking a significant
change in the procedures meant to insulate such decisions from politics,
congressional aides and current and former employees familiar with the issue
said.

Disclosure of the change comes amid growing public criticism of Justice
Department decisions to approve Republican-engineered plans in Texas and
Georgia that were found to hurt minority voters by career staff attorneys
who analyzed the plans. Political appointees overruled staff findings in
both cases.

The policy was implemented in the Georgia case, said a Justice employee
who, like others interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity because of
fears of retaliation. A staff memo urged rejecting the state’s plan to
require photo identification at the polls because it would harm black
voters.

But under the new policy, the recommendation was stripped out of that
document and was not forwarded to higher officials in the Civil Rights
Division, several sources familiar with the incident said.

The policy helps explain why the Justice Department has portrayed an Aug.
25 staff memo obtained by The Washington Post as an “early draft,” even
though it was dated one day before the department gave “preclearance,” or
approval, to the Georgia plan. The state’s plan has since been halted on
constitutional grounds by a federal judge who likened it to a Jim Crow-era
poll tax.

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This must be the answer to the “Activist Judges”. Instead of letting cases
out of the DOJ, they stop them there.

The rights of a voter are the protection of our democracy. The Bush
administration continues to show that it does not want America to be a democracy
but rather an empire ruled by a theocracy. You read a story like this or others
involving voters rights being tramples and you start to realize why some people
were saying George Lucas’s final Star Wars movie was likened to the Bush regime.