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Dave Zweifel's Plain Talk: Van Hollen's trying to make it harder to vote

Dave Zweifel  —  10/03/2008 5:32 am

Throughout its history, Wisconsin has done whatever it could to make it easy for people to exercise their duty as citizens -- vote.

It was one of the first to make it easier to vote by absentee for those who couldn't get to the polls on election day and more than 30 years ago enacted one of the first laws to allow voters to register the day of the election.

And throughout its history, unlike so many states, Wisconsin has enjoyed clean and honest elections because the state's 72 county clerks take the job of overseeing the polling places seriously and state laws have made voting easy. The few cases in which some politicians claimed there was voting fraud, primarily in the Milwaukee area, didn't stand up after authorities investigated those claims.

All of this doesn't sit well with Republican Party operatives who have been on a nationwide campaign to make it harder for people to vote. They engineered a new federal law, laughably called the Help America Vote Act, to require states to maintain statewide lists. They know that if they can require people to show ID cards, driver's licenses and other forms of identification, the people most affected will be the elderly and the poor, groups that typically favor Democrats.

There is little question that's behind our Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen's cynical election eve lawsuit to require the county clerks to do the next-to-impossible task of checking tens of thousands of names on voting lists all the way back to January 2006. Because thousands of people have moved (and who moves more than low-income people and many older folks?), there's a chance that many people will be dropped from the roles. Then when they try to re-register, lines are likely to become jammed, frustrating would-be voters.

Van Hollen filed his suit after returning from the Republican Convention in St. Paul, where he met with Karl Rove and other GOP strategists who have been engineering this vote suppression scheme. It's no accident that Van Hollen is the Wisconsin co-chair of the John McCain for President committee, which has pledged to deliver the state for him.

Interestingly, there wasn't a peep out of Van Hollen's office when the McCain campaign sent information to people around the state with erroneous return addresses for requesting absentee ballots. Following the instructions in the mailing could lead to voters running afoul of election rules.

There was a time in Wisconsin that Republicans and Democrats joined hands to make democracy work at the polling place.

Thanks to modern day politicians like Van Hollen, no more.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.

Dave Zweifel  —  10/03/2008 5:32 am