Last week, Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen filed a lawsuit against the Government Accountability Board. The case will be heard tomorrow. If Van Hollen wins, the case will be a monument to the irresponsibility — on the part of both Van Hollen and the GAB — that can seriously tempt a voter to use his ballot as a Kleenex. Or worse.
Van Hollen hopes his lawsuit will force the GAB, which administers state elections, to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act. HAVA requires each state to gather a list of its registered voters, then cross-reference that list with information from other state agencies. This law is intended to prevent voter fraud by purging the dead, the felons and other ineligible voters from the lists. HAVA gave the states until Jan. 1, 2006, to set up this system. Wisconsin didn’t boot the system up until two and a half years later, on Aug. 6, 2008.
Now, Van Hollen wants to double-check the identity of voters who registered by mail before Wisconsin put HAVA into effect. Van Hollen believes that these voters, who did not need to include identification, are the most likely to be involved in voting fraud in the pre-HAVA system. He will demand in court tomorrow that the GAB require election officials to confirm the identity and eligibility of the 240,000 voters who registered by mail since January of 2006.
Too much, too soon, protests the GAB. Failures to match up with the state databases happen over 20 percent of the time and are primarily caused by typos and other clerical errors. The GAB must resolve each discrepancy individually and argues that running this process through two-and-a-half years’ worth of registrations, nearly a quarter million registered voters, will take far too long to resolve in time for the upcoming presidential elections, less than two months away.
Democrats and Republicans alike have hammered this issue with their usual talking points. One side claims to be protecting the election process from a diabolical government conspiracy to disenfranchise voters, the other claims to be protecting the election process from the scurrilous rabble who would cheat the election results. In reality, there is nothing but healthy doses of irresponsibility on all sides.
The lawsuit, if successful, will not disenfranchise voters or “deny Wisconsin citizens the right to vote,” as the Democratic Party of Wisconsin said Monday at a press conference. Voters who are still unverified when election season rolls around can still confirm their identity at the polls. However, while retroactively enforcing HAVA won’t deny voters, it could dissuade them. The GAB worries that enough unverified voters during Election Day could clog the system and create a combination of turmoil and queue-induced boredom in the line to the voting booths. And here the Democrats, though they exaggerate the forcefulness with which voters might be discouraged, have a point. We live in a society where we are overjoyed to see a mere 55 percent turnout in a national election and where some of the most extensive marketing campaigns are designed to drag people into the voting booths. In a society so starved for the political participation of its citizens, any disincentive to vote must be avoided like the plague.
However, the Democrats’ accusation that the potential lowering of voter turnout is a “politically motivated” stunt is unfair. Low voter turnout does statistically tend to favor Republicans, but Van Hollen is working well within his duties as attorney general by trying to enforce a federal law upon the state. To his credit, he is not demanding for every registered voter to be confirmed, as the rest of his party is demanding — just the ones who registered by mail without an ID. And though the fact that he waited two-and-a-half years to enforce HAVA so close to election season does — and should — raise some eyebrows, the same skepticism should be raised at Wisconsin’s failure to implement HAVA in that same span of time. One could just as easily claim that the 2006 elections were a product of “politically motivated” Democrats trying to allow voter fraud.
Nevertheless, Republicans need to answer some hard questions about their reasons for causing a potential nuisance in this election. While it is important to prevent voter fraud, is it really important enough to justify discouraging people from voting? There has been no proof that voter fraud has influenced any U.S. election in any capacity — the cases that proponents of aggressive prevention all point are cases in which fraud was prevented well before an actual election. In fact, 20th century government has traditionally been the one to screw the voters during elections, not the other way around. Look at pre-Civil Rights era South for the most extreme example or even, arguably, the 2000 presidential elections.
Sadly, the same thing could happen here in Wisconsin, though on a smaller scale and due to nothing but incompetence. Wisconsin should have met the deadline for HAVA, and Van Hollen should have pursued the matter much sooner or waited until after the election to enforce it. Now, if disgusted voters turn away from the cluttered bureaucracy and congested lines, the government has no one to blame but itself.
Jack Garigliano ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in history and English.
