A Rigged Report on U.S. Voting?

Its interesting I'm running into news stories that aren't really news but confirmations of things most of us already knew.

This is slightly different because I'd not heard about this "impartial report" nor of how drastically it was altered. An excerpt from the WaPo op-ed:

By Tova Andrea Wang

After the 2000 Florida election debacle, Congress established a body called the Election Assistance Commission [EAC] to improve voting and democracy in this country. Two years ago, the commission approached me about doing a project that would take a preliminary look at voter fraud and intimidation and make recommendations for further research on the issues.

Because my approach to election issues tends to be more closely aligned with Democrats, I was paired with a Republican co-author. To further remove any taint of partisanship, my co-author and I convened a bipartisan working group to help us. We spent a year doing research and consulting with leaders in the field to produce a draft report. What happened next seems inexplicable. After submitting the draft in July 2006, we were barred by the commission's staff from having anything more to do with it.

What was the problem? In all the time we were doing our research and drafting the report, neither the staff nor the commissioners, who were continually advised of our activities and the substance of our work, raised any concerns about the direction we were going or the research findings.

Yet, after sitting on the draft for six months, the EAC publicly released a report -- citing it as based on work by me and my co-author -- that completely stood our own work on its head.

Via Washington Post.