January 18, 2005

New Voter Data

The Journal Sentinel has added lots of new information to its latest story on Milwaukee's 10,000 illegible registration cards. My comments on Lisa Artison's first public statements are below. I want to get into the new information because it shows us how vulnerable Wisconsin's voting system is to fraud.

About Racine,

Meanwhile, Racine officials said they do not send out any confirmation cards. And other cities, including Madison and Waukesha, have not completed the process, which the state Elections Board does not track.

Two paragraphs later, there's a mention that sending out verification cards is required by law. It seems Racine is ignoring that law.

Later in the story we get some numbers. That's good because we can see if Milwaukee is an anomoly. This past November, 277,535 voting in the City of Milwaukee. 84,000 of them were same-day registrants or about 30% of the total voters. In the Republican hotbed of Waukesha about 35,000 voted with 8,748 being same-day registrants or about 25% of total voters. In law-flouting Racine, 4,000 "new" same-day registrants voted out of 37,466 or about 10%, but that doesn't include those to registered because they had new addresses. In Madison 274,249 voted in the Presidential election with 17,467 being same-day registrants or a little over 6% of the total voters. Going by this new information we see Milwaukee's and Waukesha's same-day registrations at a much higher percentage than Racine's and Madison's. In 2000, 32% of Milwaukee's voters were same-day registrants. 7,153 of those cards couldn't be processed.

Don't expect much help from the State Elections Board.

[Executive Director Kevin] Kennedy said his office does not track how many registrations cannot be processed, or how many of the confirmation cards that are sent out are returned as undeliverable. Under state law, he said, any that are returned must be sent to the local district attorney's office.

That means it's up to E. Michael McCann do investigate the 10,000 bad registration cards. If his investigation of the Election Day tire slashings is any indication we'll be waiting a long time.

The final bit is the effect local webloggers have had on this story. The Journal Sentinel story put us in the same breath as the local talk radio yappers.

"City Elections Official Responds to Fraud Questions"

UPDATE: Captain Ed has been reading the same story and is comparing Milwaukee to Minneapolis. (Really Ed, Milwaukee feels more like St. Paul.) He writes,

For this election in my state of Minnesota, which allows the same kind of same-day registration, the number of successful same-day registrants (440,263) only accounts for 15.6% of all votes, and only 12% of the estimated total of registered voters in Minnesota. Even those numbers seemed high to us here, but next to Milwaukee, they're almost insignificant. In Hennepin County (Minneapolis), the most analogous to Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, the same-day registrations only account for 15.4% of the votes, while in neigboring Ramsey (St. Paul), they comprise an anemic 9.4% of the total number of votes cast.

Do a third of Milwaukee residents change their residency every four years and fail to re-register to vote? Or could it be that the overwhelming number of provisional registrations show a concerted effort to skew Wisconsin presidential elections in one particular direction? I find it hard to believe that two neighboring states could have such a wide variance in residency. Instead of focusing their ire on Bush's wide margin of victory in Ohio, the Senate should call for a federal investigation into the razor-thin results in Wisconsin for both 2000 and 2004.

Ed's "concerted effort" is another name for conspiracy which brings up a strong reason to discount voter fraud. The problem with any conspiracy is having a participant talk. People like to talk--especially when they think they have something juicy to tell. It's been 40+ years since JFK was assassinated. If the mob in conjuction with Cuba or the CIA had him wacked someone credible would have talked by now. The same can be said for accusations of voter fraud. Someone had to tell people to go to different precincts around Milwaukee and vote illegally. Yet no one talks. Maybe it's something cultural that allows people to keep secrets better when it comes to elections.

This isn't to say that voter fraud didn't take place. This will something that can never be proven in a metaphysical sense either way. So why bother focusing on this story so much? I see this a part of a bigger project to close some gaping loopholes in Wisconsin elections. We need to fix things to protect the integrity or the voting process.

"A Mighty Big Coincidence"