AG's vote lawsuit threatens to undermine democracy

An editorial  —  9/17/2008 5:30 am

When Republicans gathered in St. Paul for their national convention at the start of September, former White House political czar Karl Rove met with the Wisconsin delegation. Rove, who has been repeatedly implicated in a drive by the Bush White House to get U.S. attorneys to take steps to make it harder for minority voters and new voters to cast ballots, counseled the Wisconsin Republicans that they would need to go to extraordinary means to win the battleground state for party presidential nominee John McCain this year.

Just days after returning from the Republican convention, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, a co-chair of the McCain campaign in Wisconsin, took an action that a leading state legislator suggests could "undermine democracy" going into the election about which Rove expressed so much concern.

Van Hollen has sued the state Government Accountability Board, seeking to review -- and potentially disqualify -- the names of as many as 1 million eligible voters whose names appear on the state's poll list.

Van Hollen is demanding that the GAB and local clerks cross-check voter names with driver's license records for every Wisconsinite who filed voter registration paperwork on or after Jan. 1, 2006. That includes all new voters and all those in the state who changed their address because of a move.

Nat Robinson, the GAB's elections administrator, says the board's analysis of the suit is that more than 1 million voter records would need to be reviewed if Van Hollen's suit prevails.

This would cause widespread confusion and open up the possibility that large numbers of eligible voters would be denied the franchise -- or have the process of exercising it made dramatically more difficult -- because of the intervention of a McCain campaign leader in the voting procedures of a state that the nation's top Republican strategist is urging his fellow partisans to go all out to win.

Does this smell like a scheme to disenfranchise new voters, and those energized by the exciting 2008 presidential campaign, who might be more likely to back Democrat Barack Obama?

We are afraid so. Indeed, state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Waunakee, has warned that the attorney general "should be careful not to use his office to try to undermine democracy. Bureaucratic failures should not deny someone's right to vote."

Nothing that Van Hollen or his aides have said or done has calmed concern that partisanship -- rather than a concern for clean and efficient elections -- is the primary motivation for the suit.

Kevin St. John, a special assistant to Van Hollen, claims the attorney general is simply demanding that genuinely ineligible voters -- whom he identified as felons serving their sentences or dead people whose names have remained on voter rolls -- be prevented from voting.

St. John's statement is as absurd as it is illogical.

No serious observers of the political process would suggest that prisoners and dead people are the Wisconsinites who have registered in unprecedented numbers over the past two and a half years. And prisoners and dead people are not the Wisconsinites who will be trying to vote this November. (Presumably, the names of the dead are far more likely to be found on older, pre-2006 poll lists than on the new one.)

Even worse is Van Hollen's remarkable comment: "I think people will realize if there's one thing we haven't done since I've been attorney general is do things for partisan or political reasons. I'm not going to avoid doing what our job is, which is to enforce the law, because I'm afraid of what aspersions may be cast my way."

No attorney general in Wisconsin history has faced so many charges of abusing his office for personal and partisan purposes as Van Hollen. He stands accused of demoting watchdogs and whistle-blowers and of failing to properly oversee major investigations of corruption and wrongdoing in state government. Most recently, the attorney general's name has been at the center of a controversy involving reports of scheming to assign Wisconsin law enforcement officers to "protect" Van Hollen when he made a political trip to St. Paul to attend the party convention.

Those who suggest that Van Hollen is acting as a partisan, rather than as an advocate for sound electoral processes, are not being unreasonable.

The attorney general's own track record raises legitimate concern.

So too does the attorney general's decision to represent Washington rather than Wisconsin in the case involving the GAB and the voter roll.

The controversy over the federally imposed requirement that Wisconsin establish this voter roll has been going on for several years. Traditionally, Wisconsin has had clean elections with high levels of voter participation. Our system has worked because it has been run according to Wisconsin's nonpartisan commitment to making voting easy and efficient -- a commitment exemplified by the state's same-day registration rule, which allows qualified citizens to both register and vote on election day.

Federal interference has not just made the electoral processes of Wisconsin more bureaucratic and inefficient -- the creation of the voter roll has been a nightmare and the work is still not complete -- it has made them less reflective of Wisconsin's democratic values and ideals.

Van Hollen, as the elected attorney general of Wisconsin, should be intervening on behalf of Wisconsinites to get the heavy hand of the federal government out of the process so that this state can do what it has in the past: Hold an open, fair and responsible election that invites broad participation and produces a result that honestly and accurately reflects the sentiments of the electorate. That's what former Attorney General Bronson La Follette did when, as a Democrat, he battled the national Democratic Party's attempts to mess with Wisconsin's open primary system in the 1970s and 1980s.

Instead, Van Hollen is taking the side of the same federal meddlers who have been linked -- via the U.S. attorney firing scandal and other controversies -- to alleged efforts by Bush administration insiders to suppress voter turnout and deny protections to minority voters, the young and the vulnerable.

In filing this suit, J.B. Van Hollen is not doing the job he was narrowly elected to perform in 2006.

Instead, the attorney general appears to be doing the job he signed on for when he agreed to co-chair John McCain's Wisconsin campaign.

An editorial  —  9/17/2008 5:30 am