The long-awaited voter fraud and intimidation report released by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is deeply disturbing—and contradicts an initial draft of the same report that reached widely different conclusions.

The discrepancies between the earlier draft and last week’s report raise the specter of partisan motives on a commission meant to provide bipartisan election review. In fact, the consultants hired to write the report were not allowed to publicly present their findings before the commission.

In short, it appears that a well-researched report that could have provided a roadmap to meaningful election reform has been quashed, and replaced with a confusing mish-mash meant to stifle reform for political purposes.

An analysis by People For the American Way Foundation civil rights attorney David Becker, a former trial attorney for the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, finds that the report:

• ignores key data while emphasizing questionable analyses
• ignores evidence that restrictive voter ID laws disenfranchise eligible voters, at the same time ignoring the complete lack of evidence that the voter-impersonation fraud such laws seek to address actually exists
• provides no specific, workable suggestions for election reform to address intimidation or fraud
• creates an awkward, vague and unworkable definition for “election crimes’ that excludes serious violations of voting rights

You can find David’s analysis at http://media.pfaw.org/EAC.pdf.