The New York Times and other media are reporting that at least one of the recently fired United States Attorneys was canned because he was not, according to the Republican Party and White House officials, going after claims of voter registration fraud aggressively enough during the tightly contested 2004 election. This is hardly surprising. Partisan activists and legislators have been relentlessly making bogus and exaggerated claims of voter fraud to disenfranchise voters who are likely to vote for the other side for the last several years.

According to the New York Times, White House advisor Karl Rove:

passed on complaints about . . . David C. Iglesias, who was dismissed as the United States attorney in New Mexico. Mr. Rove’s role surfaced after the McClatchy Newspapers reported that a Republican Party official in New Mexico had complained to Mr. Rove in 2005 and again a year later about Mr. Iglesias’s failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation. Concern about voter registration fraud turned political in several states in 2004 where there were close elections, including some lost narrowly by Republican candidate.

New Mexico, it might be recalled, was a serious battleground state in 2004. As a result, progressive civic organizations engaged in a major voter registration push there. Conservatives in the state made angry allegations that the organizations were engaged in massive fraud when it was discovered that a volunteer had registered an under-age teenager. Plenty of civil rights groups were skeptical at the time and were concerned that this was an attempt at voter intimidation even as elections officials, including Republicans, conceded that bogus voter registrations were often the result of innocent mistakes and that any voter registration fraud was unlikely to have an impact at the polls. As Lori Minnite has just written in her report, “The Politics of Voter Fraud”:

Duplicate registration cards, improperly filled out cards, cards from people who are not eligible to vote or who don’t live in the district in which the card was submitted are not uncommon in the chaotic pre-election atmosphere of an intense political campaign. Imperfect voter registration drives and simple human error, however, are not the same as voter fraud, nor do they inevitably lead to fraudulent voting.

Nonetheless, Iglesias evidently took the complaints seriously, even setting up a statewide criminal task force. After a major investigation, however, he found most of the complaints were deemed “not criminally prosecutable.” This is when the partisan complaints about the United States Attorney began.

This is fairly damning evidence that claims of fraud have been made so that the law can be manipulated in the name of cleaning up elections when the true purpose is partisan gain in an election.

Conservatives talk incessantly about fraud. They repeat what have become practically mantras about “dead people voting,” voters voting twice, and noncitizens voting. Yet every bit of evidence shows that these types of activities simply do not occur to nearly the extent they claim. Nonetheless, conservative politicians and their supporters vigorously fight for measures that would address these nonexistent problems while completely ignoring the real types of fraud and other forms of malfeasance that are perpetrated against the voters and the voting system. Their motive is, simply put, purely political.

The voter identification debate has been the most obvious example of this abuse. In each case where strict, disenfranchising identification requirements have been enacted, including the U.S. House of Representatives, it has been on practically straight party and racial lines. The rationale for requiring photo voter identification at the polls, proponents argue, is that there is widespread fraud that must be stopped. Identification supporters, overwhelmingly Republicans, continue to make this argument no matter how many times they are confronted with the facts: study after study and investigation after investigation show that polling place fraud of the sort that identification would prevent has rarely occurred. Meanwhile, thousands—perhaps millions—of eligible voters would be disenfranchised by such a requirement, affecting election outcomes. Identification requirements would be most likely to impede the poor, minorities, the disabled, the young, and the elderly—all groups that historically have tended to vote for Democrats.

While the call for voter identification is their main battle cry, partisan players have been almost as relentless about going after what they argue is massive voter registration fraud, as they claimed was the case in New Mexico. Again, there are isolated cases of phony registration forms submitted, but they are isolated and never amount to any impact on the outcome of an election. Yet partisan election officials and legislators make exaggerated claims so that they can enact draconian restrictions on voter registration activities that seek to enfranchise poor, immigrant and minority communities.

The controversy over the firing of the United States Attorneys demonstrates that questioning the motives behind these measures is probably justified. Both press and the public will be right in the future if they demand hard evidence. We’ve all learned in recent years the virtues of careful analysis, untainted by politics and ideology.

Tova Andrea Wang is a Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation.