John Fund’s OpinionJournal column (reprinted here) discusses the U.S. attorneys firings and vote fraud allegations. Here is a snippet:

Tom McCabe, head of the Building Industry Association of Washington, wrote to GOP Rep. Doc Hastings calling for the White House to replace Mr. McKay. I was copied on Mr. McCabe’s letter, and spent some time reviewing the evidence he had accumulated. While it’s true Mr. McKay had a full docket of cases at the time, his complete lack of interest in voting irregularities during the recall battle certainly was odd.
That’s also the judgment of Michael McDonald, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who authored a liberal Brennan Center report last year that debunked vote fraud allegations by the New Jersey Republican Party. While Mr. McDonald believes that Washington State’s 2004 election did not turn up evidence of significant voter fraud, he says he finds it “curious that McKay decided not to prosecute the 40 (some) felons who provided sworn affidavits of casting fraudulent votes that the Republicans offered as evidence in the gubernatorial recount trial.” Mr. McKay himself told the Seattle Times this week: “We never found any evidence of criminal conduct.” That is clearly belied by the facts.

John’s quote from Michael was taken from a posting of Michael’s on the election law listserv. There are a number of journalists lurking on the list, and John is one of them. But John didn’t follow one of the main rules of the listserv for journalists: no one may quote from listserv postings without the permission of the poster. John says that he forgot the rule and has “simply and clearly apologize[d]’ in an email he sent to Michael and me when I brought this to his attention. (Note that Michael did not complain to me about this issue.)
Michael has written this letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, which he has given me permission to reprint in its entirety:

Dear editors,
John Fund quotes me out of context in an opinion editorial appearing in the March 13, 2007 edition of your newspaper.
Despite Fund’s characterization to the contrary, I note that Washington U.S Attorney McKay thoroughly investigated vote fraud claims. He assigned an attorney to look into the allegations. He conferred with the lead Republican
attorney in the recount case where the affidavits from felon voters originated, the FBI, and his superiors at the Justice Department.
The problem is that Washington has a clunky system of reinstating felon voting rights and voter confusion resulted. The state actually sent absentee ballots to these ineligible felons. For a crime to have been committed, the felons had to know they were violating the law, which would be impossible to prove if the state gave them a ballot.
This is the same reason, by the way, why Rove and others avoided federal prosecution for leaking Plame’s covert CIA identity. It is extremely difficult to successfully prosecute cases where intention must be established.
Like Fitzgerald, who declined to prosecute Rove, all responsible adults who looked at the Washington vote fraud realized that these individuals could not be prosecuted for being confused.
The good news is that since the 2004 election, Washington has taken steps to reduce confusion through education efforts and better maintenance of their voter registration lists.
McKay deserves to be praised for resisting political pressure to prosecute confused, but otherwise innocent, people. The justice system is not a political toy. People like John Fund should be condemned for treating it as such.
Sincerely,
Michael McDonald