Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen spoke on the importance of preventing voter fraud: “We are out there front and center everyday … doing what we can to make sure that those people who have illegally and illegitimately registered to vote don’t have the opportunity on election day to show up and take away your vote by casting one that is not legal.”
He is right. It is important that our democratic process operates accurately and without corruption. The problem is that suing the Government Accountability Board to have it retroactively cross-check 241,000 newly registered voters in a grossly deficient manner is one of the best ways to ensure the opposite.
It is quite easy to find op-eds and political speeches that decry the substantial harm fraudulent registration and voting does to the election process. Among Republicans it is even an “article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections,” according to the former political director of the Republican Party of Texas, Royal Masset. But apart from rare and isolated news alerts concerning alleged voter fraud, there are very few sources recounting substantiated instances and evidence of fraudulent voting.
An authoritative and highly regarded report was published on the subject by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School. Featured prominently in the report were the results of the Wisconsin 2004 presidential election. If voter fraud is truly a problem in our state it would have been prominent in a general election such as the one in ’04, considering how closely predicted and contested our state was. However, what the results of the study suggest is that we are picking a fight with an imaginary enemy.
Votes cast by individuals in the name of deceased people, convicted felons, double voters and people voting under aliases are the source of substantial voter fraud right? Wrong. In fact, out of almost exactly three million total votes cast in the 2004 presidential election in the state, there were — count them — 7 substantiated cases of individuals knowingly casting fraudulent votes, amounting to a rate of .0002%. This rarity should be expected, considering the severity of the possible punishment — five years in prison and a $10,000 fine — and the measly nature of the payoff, one extra vote in a sea of nearly three million.
But what about fraudulent registrations sent by mail; that’s what this lawsuit is really about, right? Assuming mail fraud is actually what this lawsuit is about, which I am skeptical of, there were — hold on to your seats — four individuals who allegedly submitted false registration forms prior to the 2004 presidential election. None of these registrants were allowed to vote on Election Day.
These numbers obviously represent a miniscule and virtually irrelevant effect on an election, but why not enforce the act for this election anyway and attempt to eliminate absolutely all voter fraud? I would be inclined to agree, except that in the process of attempting to curb all alleged voter fraud by retroactively enforcing the Help America Vote Act, more harm is done to the accuracy and efficiency of our democratic process than good. Verifying these newly registered voters places an undue burden on those who need it the least — people who registered for the February Democratic primary in urban centers such as Milwaukee, where having to re-register or verify identification at polling places on Election Day could cause serious problems.
Hence the recent interventions of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a Milwaukee teachers’ union become evident. Most of these urban, newly registered voters are people of color, of which roughly 50 percent do not have driver license records to check. This leaves only their social security information to verify their registration with, which is shown to fail at an impeccable rate of 25 percent. So about a quarter of newly registered black voters will be asked to re-register at the polls — causing massive backup at urban polling sites. This will come on an Election Day that promises a record-breaking turnout with discouragingly long lines. All of this congestion and confusion will undoubtedly result in people deciding to stay home, leave the polling location once they see the line or have waited in it for an hour or more generally disenfranchise a substantial portion of voters.
Given all of this, the fundamental question becomes: If there is no real threat of voter fraud, and the national interest in accommodating and encouraging as many voters as possible on Election Day is being compromised, why would our state’s attorney general be so interested in this lawsuit? Though many may disagree, it is not that old J.B. is just uninformed and lacking intelligence. Nor is it that he intentionally wants to disenfranchise strongly democratic voters in urban areas. The reason he is pressing this lawsuit is because John McCain’s presidential campaign wants to disenfranchise strongly democratic voters in urban areas, and Van Hollen just so happens to be the co-chair of their campaign in Wisconsin. If you are skeptical of that claim, consider the fact that McCain is opposed by a campaign that has been incredibly successful at registering new voters, largely in urban areas, as a central premise of their political strategy to win in November. It only makes sense that the McCain camp would want to thwart that effort. This is, after all, presidential politics, and worse has happened in presidential politics. Further proof rests in the McCain campaign’s interest in focusing on ACORN, a community organization, which has been accused of engaging in fraudulent voting practices. Although we can’t really blame the McCain campaign for wanting to frustrate the strategy of the campaign it opposes, even if it means opposing the improvement of the fabric of our democracy, we can certainly blame Van Hollen for abusing the powers of his office and subordinating his responsibilities to the citizenry of the state of Wisconsin in order to achieve partisan gain. In my estimation, this is the only conclusion to draw from the pursuit of an enemy who is utterly imaginary.
