August 17, 2004: Lawmaker Asks US Attorney to Investigate ‘Evidence’ of ‘Voter Fraud’ in New Mexico; FBI Will Find No Evidence of Criminality

Representative Heather Wilson (R-NM) writes a letter to US Attorney David Iglesias complaining about what she considers to be evidence of possible voter fraud in her district. She reports that an unusually large number of mailings from her office to newly registered voters are being returned as undeliverable. She asks Iglesias to “investigate whether these voter registrations were lawful and whether any organizations or groups are intentionally causing false voter registration forms to be filed with the county clerk.” Iglesias will not respond to Wilson’s letter until October 29, 2004, just days before the November elections, and will inform Wilson that he is referring her complaint to the FBI “for their review and possible action. The FBI will determine whether a federal investigation may be warranted.” Wilson will forward Iglesias’s response to her chief of staff with the handwritten comment: “What a waste of time. Nobody home at US Attorney’s Office.” Wilson will later state that she faults Iglesias for not pursuing her complaint in a timely manner. It is unclear whether she is aware of Iglesias’s Election Fraud Task Force, formed in September 2004 (see September 7 - October 6, 2004). The FBI will find that the undeliverable mailings referred to in Wilson’s complaints were returned because of incomplete addresses on voter registration cards (i.e. apartment numbers left out), errors by Wilson’s office in addressing the envelopes, or because the people mailings were sent to, usually college students, had since moved. The FBI will recommend, and the task force will concur, that no further investigation of Wilson’s complaints is warranted. [US Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 9/29/2008] Wilson’s letter is spurred by New Mexico Republicans’ efforts to block ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) from registering new voters in largely Hispanic and poor areas. The effort is being led by Matt Henderson, an Albuquerque resident and ACORN head organizer; under Henderson’s leadership, ACORN is registering thousands of new voters, whom Republicans in New Mexico and Washington, DC, correctly fear will vote largely Democratic. ACORN and other groups are battling Republican efforts to institute strict voter ID laws, which critics say will hinder poor, minority, and elderly voters from participating in elections. In 2000, the state had gone for Democrat Al Gore by a vanishingly small margin of 366 votes; both parties believe that the 2004 presidential election will be equally close. By August 2004, ACORN and other groups have signed up some 65,000 new voters in Bernalillo County, which encompasses Albuquerque. Sheriff Darren White is the person who allegedly found voter registration errors in some 3,000 forms filed with the Bernalillo County clerk, including forms lacking Social Security numbers, complete addresses, and the like. White, the chairman of the New Mexico Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, who proudly admits to being made chair in order to deliver Bernalillo County for Bush-Cheney, calls those errors evidence of massive and systematic voter fraud. He has already written to Iglesias, on August 5, asking that Iglesias investigate the “suspect” registration forms. Wilson’s letter to Iglesias comes less than two weeks after White’s letter. [Atlas, 2010, pp. 213]