[media-credit name=’BEN CLASSON/Herald photo’ align=’alignright’ width=’336′][/media-credit]

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin Monday bashed Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s decision to sue the Government Accountability Board.

DPW Chair Joe Wineke reprimanded Van Hollen for what he called a “politically motivated lawsuit aimed at disenfranchising voters in order to sway the election in favor of his candidate.”

Van Hollen, who also serves as co-chair of Wisconsin’s campaign to elect Republican candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., sued the Government Accountability Board last week demanding they cross-check driver’s licenses with names in the state’s voter registration database.

Rep. Joe Parisi, D-Madison, also spoke at the press conference. “Just because one bureaucratic database doesn’t perfectly match another, that is no reason to disenfranchise up to one million voters,” he said.

“The Van Hollen suit seizes on technical problems and clerical errors to deny Wisconsin citizens the right to vote,” Parisi said.

Van Hollen filed the lawsuit after the Government Accountability Board finished setting up their system on August 6, 2008. However, a federal mandate, the Help America Vote Act, required the system to be in place by Jan. 1, 2008. Van Hollen has demanded the GAB check information of voters registered between the two dates.

Wineke said Van Hollen filed the suit two months prior to the November presidential election in order to stop Democrats from voting, which would help put McCain into office.

The two men also talked about McCain’s recent mass mailing of absentee ballot applications in Wisconsin, some of which they said had the wrong clerk office addresses on the return address. 

“Within days of Van Hollen filing the lawsuit, McCain sent out thousands — if not hundreds — of absentee ballot requests with misleading information,” Wineke said. “Their response was ‘no list is perfect.’ The hypocrisy of this is astounding.”

According to Parisi, the mistaken mailing addresses are another ploy to stop Democrats from voting.

“People think they applied when the application didn’t make it to the proper place,” Parisi said. “He is sending these to 75 percent democratic areas and many of these ballots have been addressed to the wrong clerks. Draw your own conclusions from that.”

But Mark Jefferson, chair of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, said he disagrees entirely.

“There are a couple different types of disenfranchisement: One is folks who should be allowed to vote who can’t, which we should all oppose, and the other is the type of person who votes legally and follows the rule yet [their] vote [is] negated by someone who doesn’t follow the rules [and] yet is allowed to vote,” Jefferson said.

According to Jefferson, Van Hollen is doing the right thing by making sure the Government Accountability Board takes the issue of voter checks and voter fraud seriously. 

As for the mass mailing by McCain’s campaign, Jefferson said it was “an honest mistake.”

“The absentee voter program has one goal: To get more people to the polls and get more people to vote,” Jefferson said. “There is no interest by the campaign to have postcards go to the wrong municipal courts. There is no possible advantage to the campaign to do that intentionally.”