Owen's At It, Again

I've been giving Owen a free ride lately, what with my being on hiatus, and stuff. That ends today.

Today Owen's off on this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial. Now, I am not one to praise the paper very often, but their editorial stance on election reform is both reasonable and fair. They take the stance (and I concur) that Wisconsin's voting laws, which, yes, are "liberal," are responsible for our higher-than-average turnout and great participation. Messing around with the laws without good cause, they say, is a bad idea, with this specific editorial arguing against uber-strict photo-ID rules.

Owen, who has been doing a toned-down Wayne Madsen impression, is convinced that something is not kosher in (Democratic-voting) Milwaukee, and the fault is our "liberal" voting laws:

No, [he writes,] identification fraud hasn’t been proven, nor can it ever be proven.  If voters do not currently have to prove their identity, how is it possible to prove identification fraud?  [. . .] What we can look at is a preponderance of the evidence.  We have thousands more votes than we have voters, which indicates that people may have voted more than once.  We have well over a thousand same-day registration forms for which no voter can be verified, indication than many people may have provided false identification.  There are many indications that massive voter fraud took place in Wisconsin, but it will never be proven to a certainty.

What I see (and have seen, as a Milwaukee voter) is septuagenarians who are overtaxed on a 16-hour day.

Look, I am pretty well plugged in to the Milwaukee Democratic/ liberal/ leftist/ Green/ anarchist community. I go to meetings. I'm on email lists that would make Castro blush. If there were a concerted effort to perpetrate fraud in Milwaukee, I would have heard about it. Hell, I might have been leading it. But no such effort existed. Owen (and the conservative yakkers on the radio) are trying to weave innocuous threads into some tapestry of Democratic evil-doing. It just isn't true.

More importantly, let's look at some of the editorial Owen didn't quote, information you should probably take into account:

The new rule would make voting more of a hassle for the 123,000 Wisconsin voting-age residents who, according to the Department of Transportation, lack a state driver's license or ID card and for those residents who lose or forget their cards. The bill's provision to offer both the license and ID card free of charge lessens the hassle only somewhat. (And, by the way, that would cost the state an estimated $1 million per year. [Where's the "why we need TABOR" now?])

[. . . ] The Legislature's premature fix would move Wisconsin into a tie with South Carolina for the most stringent identification requirements in the country. That's not good company; the Dixie state has a sordid history of denying voting rights to African-Americans.

Seriously. Think about that: Do we want to be more like Minnesota or like South Carolina? Y'all?