More ACORN stories: here



Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen is suing Wisconsin’s election authorities to make them do what federal law says they should have been doing for years. It’s the least he could do.
No, really: the least. Van Hollen’s lawsuit has municipal clerks justifiably scared and has prompted synthetic outrage from critics, but all he really is asking is that the Government Accountability Board see to it that the anti-fraud checks it should have been running get run.
The clerks are spooked because this could impose impossible amounts of work mere weeks before a big turnout. But that’s the result of Wisconsin blowing past the federal deadline for checking registrations against other government records to find dead voters and fake names. The deadline was in January 2004. Wisconsin got two years of waiver and took 31 months beyond that.
We’re so late, the board told clerks not to crosscheck registrations turned in before August but after federal law started requiring it. Because of that, Van Hollen’s suit says, legitimate votes could be “diminished and diluted” by ineligible voters.
That’s what the state’s database of registered voters was supposed to prevent. Only it won’t work if you don’t use it. It’s long past the time someone in Madison, including Van Hollen, should have taken the federal vote fraud law seriously. Enforcing it isn’t outrageous behavior by an attorney general. Actually, it is his job.
It beats the other approach, which is to tell voters not to worry their little heads. This is the premise of those assailing Van Hollen, especially the left-wing pressure group One Wisconsin Now, which made the preposterous claim that Van Hollen is doing partisan mischief to disenfranchise voters.
Unlikely, says John Fortier, a researcher at the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project. Say your voter list entry doesn’t match your driver’s license. Under federal law, “they’re not allowed to just turn you away from the polls,” he said. In Wisconsin, since anyone can register on election day, the worst possibility is that it’ll take longer to vote.
It isn’t really disenfranchisement that bothers Van Hollen’s angriest critics. It is that taking the federal law seriously implies that cheating is a real possibility. This is a given in that humans cheat in every other competitive endeavor. It has become the Possibility That Must Not Be Named for a portion of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and its allies for no better reason than that Republicans brought it up.
The claim that there can be no fraud has been fraying for years, most recently when two left-leaning activist groups in Milwaukee said their own vote-drive workers had tried registering dead or non-existent voters. One of the groups, ACORN, was at the center of vote scandals in Seattle in 2006 and Ohio last month. These were not cases of misplaced initials and data entry errors. Political activists made up voters or signed up dead ones, exactly a kind of offense cited in a Milwaukee police report documenting hundreds of instances of fraud in the 2004 election.
That it can be done and not caught — ACORN wasn’t caught; it turned its own workers in — mocks the maxim that every vote counts. By insisting that cheating is so unlikely that we aren’t even interested in learning whether it takes place, we are unable to say whether any vote counts.
We’re in this fix because sensibly asking voters to identify themselves via the customary photo ID is anathema to one side, even after offers of free ID cards for all and after the U.S. Supreme Court said such rules do not “even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.”
So we pay millions and wait years for a database the state won’t even use properly. We put off matters until fixing it threatens to bury city clerks, until seven weeks before a critical election possibly determined by a few thousand ballots in Wisconsin — the validity of which, we’re told, is unknowable but shouldn’t worry us.
Demanding the elections board do its job was the least Van Hollen could do for legitimate voters.
- Patrick McIlheran is a Journal Sentinel editorial columnist.
(jsonline.com/)