Voter Fraud Investigation--Update

I'm just writing a new post, instead of updating the one below, as Blogger seems to be down for maintenance and I can't get in to update. I wrote that one in haste on my way out of school, and had not had a chance to hear any of the press conference. Luckily, I then spent an hour fifteen in construction and construction overflow traffic, and heard some snippets.

Several notes first about the Borowski article, which has been updated. Someone--the reporter or the editors--has softened the dig at state Republicans at the end of the article. That's intriguing, because I think it's perfectly reasonable to criticize state Republicans on this issue. They have advanced exactly one voting reform, the voter ID. Noting else has come from them about fixing obvious and systemic flaws in elections in Milwaukee and elsewhere. It's as if not a damn thing else matters to them. Yet, the voter ID is the one thing that would not have made a bit of difference in the activities outlined today.

Borowski's piece has been expanded, here's an interesting note:

[Bush-appointee U.S. Attorney Steve] Biskupic said there was no indication of a widespread conspiracy to commit voter fraud, or of any knowledge or involvement by poll workers or any other city officials.

Nevertheless, he and McCann said they remain troubled that three months after the investigation started city officials still have been unable to account for a gap of about 4,500, with more ballots counted than people listed as voting. [. . .]

Record-keeping problems by the city have meant investigators from the FBI and Milwaukee Police Department have logged more than 1,000 hours reviewing some 70,000 same-day registration cards, including 1,300 that could not be processed due to missing names, addresses and other information.

Indeed, about 100 cards described as "of interest to investigators" cannot be located, officials said. And within the past few weeks police found a different box of the cards at the Election Commission offices.

This will, I hope, put to rest the constant cries of "fraud!" among Wisconsin Republicans convinced that Kerry won Wisconsin only through malfeasance. There simply is no way that any wide-spread conspiracy--especially one involving up to 4600 overvotes--would go undetected for so long. The logistics would be murder.

The report also should confirm what Democrats have been admitting all along: Milwaukee's election system is more screwed up than (insert Paris Hilton joke here). I've long contended (do the Googling yourself) that it's only in elections this close that the kind of base incompetence and regular discrepancies come to light. Step one in cleaning up Milwaukee's election mess was getting rid of the deadwood at the top. Now it's a matter, as Tom Barrett has said, of adequately funding, training, and deploying election personnel.

I downloaded the preliminary report (you can, too, here in .pdf format) and read it, twice. In it, I still find no assertions of fraud that would have been stopped by voter ID. If there was more detail in this accusation that there were "more than 100 instances of suspected double-voting, voting in names of persons who likely did not vote, and/or voting in names believed to be fake," maybe there would be something to it. But these things--particularly the double-voting, as I noted in the post below--are easy to do with ID, as well. Double-voting is the fault of the poll workers, and a $20 fake ID can take care of the rest. Republicans are all about the "paper trail" that a voter ID would create, except that fake IDs leave no paper trail. As it is, I hope that they exhaust every resource available to them to bring anyone who did commit fraud--particularly those who falsified names on the registration rolls--so we can get to the bottom of it.

(An aside: One of the most disturbing things I've found about Wisconsin since moving here is that when you get a new driver's license, they give you the old license back. If I were unscrupulous, I could vote in my old Riverwest ward in addition to my current one. But I'm not that unscrupulous.)

The report is pretty scathing in its criticism of poll workers and city elections officials. This is my favorite part (and remember, when you register at the polls under current law, you must show proof of identity):

[I]n the November 2004 election, same-day registrations were accepted in which the [registration] card had incomplete information that would help establish identity. [. . .] There were part of approximately 1,300 same-day registrations for which votes were cast, but which election officials could not authenticate as proper voters within the City.

Included in this 1,300 were 141 same-day registrants from addresses outside the City of Milwaukee. In several instances, the voter explicitly listed municipality names other than Milwaukee on the registration cards. These included cards that listed "West Allis," "Oak Creek," "Ashland," "Reedsburg," and "Hayward."

My theory is that at least some of these were college students who did not vote at home but did not write their current addresses on the cards after showing proof of identity with their Milwaukee college address. The poll workers should have caught the discrepancy. But on November 2, most polling places were understaffed for how hopping they turned out to be--further evidence that we need more and better workers at the polls.

Asking for an ID will only inconvenience those there to vote legally, and will not dissuade anyone out to commit fraud. If anything, this report details exactly where the weaknesses are in Milwaukee's system and how to exploit them.

Stacie, Scott, and Bill Christofferson have more.