Leiendecker Caught Red-Handed in Voter Intimidation Ploy

Last week, St. Louis City Republican election director Scotty Leiendecker was boldly sending letters to individuals whom the organization ACORN had registered to vote. Leiendecker's letter informed those newly registered voters --primarily black voters-- that each had to take further steps to prove that the registration was not "fraudulent." Today Leiendecker is quickly slithering away from his previous stance by retracting the letters and simultaneously laying bare the intent to intimidate and suppress voters which animated his earlier letter.

Leiendecker's letter to new voters was pointed in its message. It included the instruction (emphasis in original):

Please call the Registration Department at 622-4336 promptly upon receipt of this letter, but no later than November 1, 2006, to insure that your Application is complete and you are eligible to vote on November 7.

Leiendecker's point was clear: voters who received this letter were required to complete further steps or risk not having their chance to vote on Election Day. But then a funny thing happened. Multiple entities, including the non-partisan Advancement Project and the Missouri Secretary of State, informed Leiendecker and the board that they were possibly committing a criminal act by interfering with the right of individuals to register and vote, and at the very least were acting in derogation of statute.

In the blink of an eye, Scotty realizes that the jig is up on his little game of Pin-the-Fraud-on-the-Donkeys and we get a story from KSDK in St. Louis informing us that the Leiendecker is now sending out another letter and that no one was really going to risk his or her registration by not responding to the letter, even though that's what his letter said.

Of course, the question for Leiendecker on the tongue of anyone who saw both the original Post-Dispatch story and the KSDK piece is, "If the law doesn't require you to 'confirm' the registrations of these newly registered voters, as you now freely admit it doesn't, then what reason could you have had for sending the letter besides sowing confusion and possibly keeping some eligible and likely Democratic voters from voting?"

There is, of course, no good answer for Leiendecker to give. This is what's known as getting caught with one's pants down. Had Leiendecker stuck by his guns and argued plausibly that he thought the law required him to confirm registrations, he might have had a chance. Once he admitted that the law requires no such thing and that the registrants would be able to vote without responding, it became crystal clear that the initial letter was never anything but a tawdry attempt at intimidating minority voters.

The Republicans in Jeff City love talking about "election fraud." They like talking about it so much that this year they passed an unconstitutional bill under the pretext of hemming in such fraud. Yet here we see a Republican election director for the city of St. Louis engaging in election fraud --complete with evidence of a type and clarity that Republicans were never able to produce to bolster their case-- that the GOP's "reforms" did nothing about. Maybe Governor Blunt, Rod Jetton and Mike Gibbons can prove to us again how important "stopping voter fraud" is to them by each calling for Leiendecker's resignation.

I won't hold my breath.

Not for nothing, but FiredUp Missouri has been calling attention to Leiendecker's hackery for some time now, even insisting recently that some of his official acts be investigated. Nevertheless, Leiendecker's neverending parade of fraud charges has regularly received straight coverage by the Missouri press, despite its often tenuous connection to reality. Maybe, finally, this story will drive home to the media that sometimes a partisan hack is just a partisan hack regardless of what post a governor appointed him to in between campaigns.

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Here's the KSDK segment referenced above: