Gary J Carter
2008-09-15 13:17:48 UTC
GOP Voter Suppression Comes to Wisconsin
Posted by Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet at 3:56 PM on September 13, 2008.
A politically timed lawsuit by the states Republican attorney general
may create chaos at polling places on Nov. 4.
Partisan voter suppression efforts have many faces, but they all have
one goal: suppressing your political opponent's voters.
In Wisconsin this past week, the Republican Attorney General, J.B. Van
Hollen, filed a politically timed lawsuit that local election
officials say will interfere with turnout for the presidential
election on Nov. 4 and create a bureaucratic nightmare for election
workers seeking to process a record number of new voter registrations
before then. The AG's game plan is simple: create a bureaucratic
nightmare to tie up the election machinery before Election Day and
then create bottlenecks to confound voters on Election Day.
According to a Sept. 12 report by Steven Elbow at Madison.com, the
Wisconsin AG filed suit this past Wednesday forcing election officials
to use a tactic being employed by Republicans in other states --
notably Michigan, Kansas and Louisiana -- that involves removing
people from voter rolls if the addresses on their voter registration
forms does not match the address on their state driver's licenses. The
rationale to purge would be based on the assumption that if the
addresses did not match then the voter registration would be incorrect
and therefore invalid.
Never mind that Wisconsin is among a handful of states where voters
can register to vote on Election Day and ostensibly clear up or
correct any registration information error at that time. The suit's
goal is voter suppression, which would be accomplished by causing
delays in voting when people show up on Election Day and are told they
are not on voter rolls and then would have to go through the
registration process, delaying them and holding up other voters in
line behind them.
What's especially outrageous about this tactic in Wisconsin is that
the very federal election law that makes this voter purging technique
illegal in most states -- the National Voter Registration Act --
exempts Wisconsin from the NVRA's voter purging process because the
state has Election Day Registration. In other words, because Wisconsin
is among a handful of states with the most liberal, voter-friendly
laws, its voters do not have the legal protections intended to stop
voter suppression in other states.
Elbow's report on Madison.com quotes that city's clerk about the
impact of the AG's suit.
"It will disenfranchise voters. That's what we're concerned about,"
City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl said. "We're working on plans to make
sure we don't have long lines at the polls, make sure that the lines
can move smoothly and quickly. If we throw this into the mix, then it
is going to slow things down."
The Madison.com report reveals the Wisconsin AG is reading from a
long-established GOP playbook, justifying 'ballot security' concerns
under the banner of preventing voter fraud.
"Van Hollen spokesman Kevin St. John said Van Hollen wants the GAB to
verify voters who registered by mail since Jan. 1, 2006, because they
didn't have to show an ID," Madison.com reported.
Imposing stricter voter ID laws has been the Republican legislative
response to so-called Democratic voter fraud in recent years. The GOP
defines this phenomena as hordes of Democrats posing as other voters
and voting more than once to pad the vote count. While there are
pre-existing election laws that ban such activity, and handfuls of
prosecutions in states when people attempt to vote more then once, the
Bush administration Justice Department has only prosecuted two dozen
such cases despite devoting significant manpower hours by federal
prosecutors to ferret out such abuse -- and even firing U.S. Attorneys
who did not pursue such cases. The GOP strategy is based on
identifying a handful of errors in filing new registration forms, a
retail-level problem, if you will, and imposing a statewide response,
a wholesale solution.
Stripped of discussing it in polite terms, it is akin to institutional
racism -- since many of likely Democratic voters targeted by such ID
laws are people of color, students and other under-represented sectors
of the public.
The Madison.com report says the state's election director, Kevin
Kennedy, told the AG that "the (state election) board is committed to
preventing voter fraud, but (said) Van Hollen's demands are too much,
too soon."
"The board believes it would be counter-productive to rush this effort
and to create a significant risk, at best of unnecessary hardship and
confusion at the polls, and at worst the disenfranchisement of
Wisconsin citizens with a clear and legitimate right to vote," Kennedy
said, in the Madison.com report.
Thousands of voter registrations will likely be affected if a court
approves the suit, the Madison.com report said.
"As the election approaches, the phones at clerks' offices get busier,
so people calling back to resolve discrepancies will be less likely to
get through," the report said. "The closer we get to the election, the
less time we have to clear things up," Witzel-Behl said.
The partisan nature of the AG's lawsuit was best expressed in a
comment by Diane Hermann-Brown, Sun Prairie city clerk, who said the
court needs to act quickly if it wants counties and municipalities to
comply. "I don't think he's wrong on what he's doing," she said of Van
Hollen. "It probably needs to get done. It just should have been done
sooner."
Hermann-Brown's comment about the suit's timing underscores why this
is a partisan action, not an exercise in good government.
Selective enforcement of voting rights laws is all about shaping
election rules to one party's benefit. If the Wisconsin AG was so
concerned about accurate voter registration rolls dating back to
January 2006, one would think he would have acted sooner than 60 days
before a presidential election. Something stinks in Wisconsin
elections -- and it's not the cheese.
A court hearing is scheduled for later this week.
Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of
What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the
2004 Election, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press,
2006).
Posted by Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet at 3:56 PM on September 13, 2008.
A politically timed lawsuit by the states Republican attorney general
may create chaos at polling places on Nov. 4.
Partisan voter suppression efforts have many faces, but they all have
one goal: suppressing your political opponent's voters.
In Wisconsin this past week, the Republican Attorney General, J.B. Van
Hollen, filed a politically timed lawsuit that local election
officials say will interfere with turnout for the presidential
election on Nov. 4 and create a bureaucratic nightmare for election
workers seeking to process a record number of new voter registrations
before then. The AG's game plan is simple: create a bureaucratic
nightmare to tie up the election machinery before Election Day and
then create bottlenecks to confound voters on Election Day.
According to a Sept. 12 report by Steven Elbow at Madison.com, the
Wisconsin AG filed suit this past Wednesday forcing election officials
to use a tactic being employed by Republicans in other states --
notably Michigan, Kansas and Louisiana -- that involves removing
people from voter rolls if the addresses on their voter registration
forms does not match the address on their state driver's licenses. The
rationale to purge would be based on the assumption that if the
addresses did not match then the voter registration would be incorrect
and therefore invalid.
Never mind that Wisconsin is among a handful of states where voters
can register to vote on Election Day and ostensibly clear up or
correct any registration information error at that time. The suit's
goal is voter suppression, which would be accomplished by causing
delays in voting when people show up on Election Day and are told they
are not on voter rolls and then would have to go through the
registration process, delaying them and holding up other voters in
line behind them.
What's especially outrageous about this tactic in Wisconsin is that
the very federal election law that makes this voter purging technique
illegal in most states -- the National Voter Registration Act --
exempts Wisconsin from the NVRA's voter purging process because the
state has Election Day Registration. In other words, because Wisconsin
is among a handful of states with the most liberal, voter-friendly
laws, its voters do not have the legal protections intended to stop
voter suppression in other states.
Elbow's report on Madison.com quotes that city's clerk about the
impact of the AG's suit.
"It will disenfranchise voters. That's what we're concerned about,"
City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl said. "We're working on plans to make
sure we don't have long lines at the polls, make sure that the lines
can move smoothly and quickly. If we throw this into the mix, then it
is going to slow things down."
The Madison.com report reveals the Wisconsin AG is reading from a
long-established GOP playbook, justifying 'ballot security' concerns
under the banner of preventing voter fraud.
"Van Hollen spokesman Kevin St. John said Van Hollen wants the GAB to
verify voters who registered by mail since Jan. 1, 2006, because they
didn't have to show an ID," Madison.com reported.
Imposing stricter voter ID laws has been the Republican legislative
response to so-called Democratic voter fraud in recent years. The GOP
defines this phenomena as hordes of Democrats posing as other voters
and voting more than once to pad the vote count. While there are
pre-existing election laws that ban such activity, and handfuls of
prosecutions in states when people attempt to vote more then once, the
Bush administration Justice Department has only prosecuted two dozen
such cases despite devoting significant manpower hours by federal
prosecutors to ferret out such abuse -- and even firing U.S. Attorneys
who did not pursue such cases. The GOP strategy is based on
identifying a handful of errors in filing new registration forms, a
retail-level problem, if you will, and imposing a statewide response,
a wholesale solution.
Stripped of discussing it in polite terms, it is akin to institutional
racism -- since many of likely Democratic voters targeted by such ID
laws are people of color, students and other under-represented sectors
of the public.
The Madison.com report says the state's election director, Kevin
Kennedy, told the AG that "the (state election) board is committed to
preventing voter fraud, but (said) Van Hollen's demands are too much,
too soon."
"The board believes it would be counter-productive to rush this effort
and to create a significant risk, at best of unnecessary hardship and
confusion at the polls, and at worst the disenfranchisement of
Wisconsin citizens with a clear and legitimate right to vote," Kennedy
said, in the Madison.com report.
Thousands of voter registrations will likely be affected if a court
approves the suit, the Madison.com report said.
"As the election approaches, the phones at clerks' offices get busier,
so people calling back to resolve discrepancies will be less likely to
get through," the report said. "The closer we get to the election, the
less time we have to clear things up," Witzel-Behl said.
The partisan nature of the AG's lawsuit was best expressed in a
comment by Diane Hermann-Brown, Sun Prairie city clerk, who said the
court needs to act quickly if it wants counties and municipalities to
comply. "I don't think he's wrong on what he's doing," she said of Van
Hollen. "It probably needs to get done. It just should have been done
sooner."
Hermann-Brown's comment about the suit's timing underscores why this
is a partisan action, not an exercise in good government.
Selective enforcement of voting rights laws is all about shaping
election rules to one party's benefit. If the Wisconsin AG was so
concerned about accurate voter registration rolls dating back to
January 2006, one would think he would have acted sooner than 60 days
before a presidential election. Something stinks in Wisconsin
elections -- and it's not the cheese.
A court hearing is scheduled for later this week.
Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of
What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the
2004 Election, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press,
2006).