Margaret Krome: AG's suit threatens our most patriotic right

Margaret Krome  —  9/30/2008 5:47 am

My son turns 18 this week, and he's excited to vote in this fall's election. But he wondered aloud last week whether his registration would be challenged. I want to vote ahead of time to avoid the long lines. But a friend worried that doing so might shunt my vote into a category that is tallied only in a close election or not at all.

I'm optimistic that neither problem will occur, but such doubts are the inevitable consequence of the last-minute furor created by Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen's voter registration verification lawsuit. It is hardly cynical for Democrats in the state to question the motives behind Van Hollen's mid-September determination to challenge the voting status of thousands of state voters.

Wisconsin was more than two years late in creating its list of verified voters in the state, as required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which passed due to the irregularities of the 2000 election. And although that tardiness was largely due to the ineptitude of the contractor chosen to oversee this process, Van Hollen is justified in criticizing the process that brought results so late.

However, Van Hollen is not justified in his proposed remedy for the discrepancies in the lists found so far. Republican leaders have alleged voter fraud before, especially in Milwaukee in the 2004 election, and they have used those allegations to justify voter identification measures that would likely have the effect of discouraging voters from voting.

But the actual nature of voter discrepancies is crucial. Comprehensive and exhaustive studies of previous allegations have been undertaken, including one by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law. After painstaking research into allegations of voter fraud, the report's author, Justin Levitt, shows such allegations to be overwhelmingly unfounded. For example: "Of the 37,180 people in Milwaukee alleged to have registered from invalid addresses, 31,500 listed accurate street addresses, but had problems with an apartment number." Other mistakes arose from similar clerical or data entry errors, such as a voter's address being listed as "Avenue" in one list but incorrectly recorded as "Street" on another, or middle initials in a voter's name having been omitted on one list but not on the list against which it was compared. The clerical nature of the error was underscored by 70 percent of these errors occurring with Election Day voter registrants; for these voters, identification was required and verified at the polls. Levitt's research into other allegations unearthed similar results: No evidence at all of systemic voting fraud.

The head of Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board, which oversaw the creation of the list mandated by the 2002 act, says that anyone who registered after 2006, upward of 1 million voters in the state, could be affected by Van Hollen's proposal to require voter identification. The League of Women Voters says it would likely cause confusion and long lines at the polls, discouraging many from voting.

Evidence has become hard to ignore that Van Hollen's role as co-chair of the McCain campaign has influenced his decision to propose these checks. The state Republican Party chairman said this week that he had conversations with Van Hollen's top aide before the attorney general filed this lawsuit. Republican Party counsel also acknowledge that they met with the attorney general's staff on this topic.

Tactics are allowed in a political campaign. But it is utterly reprehensible if the state's top legal officer designed campaign tactics intended to tamper with the essentials of democracy -- voters' franchise. Voting fraud has many meanings. One egregious one would be any attempt to obstruct people's ability to vote and to try to camouflage it as reform. And it would be ironic if a presidential candidate who touts his patriotism as proudly as does John McCain should allow his campaign to help undercut the nation's most elemental and patriotic right -- the right to vote.

Margaret Krome of Madison writes a semimonthly column for The Capital Times. 

Margaret Krome  —  9/30/2008 5:47 am