A state Republican Party official acknowledged Thursday that he talked to Justice Department lawyers before Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen sued the state's election agency over the breadth of its voter registration checks.

Christopher Mohrman, a state GOP lawyer, said after the Government Accountability Board in late August rejected the party's recommendation to expand voter registration checks, he contacted DOJ lawyers to express the party's opinion in the matter.

"If your house is robbed you call the local police," Mohrman said. "If a state agency repeatedly and flagrantly disregards its responsibility under the law, you call the attorney general. That is precisely what we did."

Mohrman said he doesn't recall exactly which lawyers he talked to, but that he didn't speak directly with Van Hollen.

Kevin St. John, a Van Hollen spokesman, confirmed that Mohrman and other GOP officials discussed the voter registration issue with Justice lawyers before the state's top cop filed the lawsuit Sept. 10.

But he said Van Hollen, a Republican, didn't take part in those conversations and that the discussions were initiated by state party officials and not the Justice Department.

St. John also said Van Hollen didn't talk about the lawsuit prior to filing it with national Republican officials or the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain, for which Van Hollen is the state campaign co-chairman.

The acknowledgments came late Thursday after the initial status conference on the lawsuit before Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi.
Earlier Thursday, immediately after the conference, St. John wouldn't say whether Van Hollen had contact with state or national GOP officials before filing the lawsuit. But he said the legal action is not being coordinated with them.

"The attorney general does not use consultation with any political party or interest group to determine whether or not an action is appropriate," St. John said. "This is not a coordinated lawsuit. I can say that absolutely."

But Democrats said Van Hollen is pursuing the lawsuit for partisan purposes, seeking to knock voters off the rolls in hopes of swinging the presidential election to McCain.

"These guys have changed their story three times in one day," said Joe Wineke, state Democratic Party chairman. "It's clear the Republican Party is using the attorney general's office to do what the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board wouldn't do."

And the accountability board's lawyer, Lester Pines, a prominent Madison Democrat, said the lawsuit was a "declaration of war" against the agency. "The attorney general has decided he wants to have a battle about this issue and the battle is now joined," he said.

Van Hollen argues that without conducting additional voter registration checks, thousands of illegal votes could be cast, affecting whether McCain or Democrat Barack Obama wins Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes and the presidency.

"Fair elections is not a partisan issue," St. John said.
At issue in the lawsuit is whether the accountability board should check its new database of registered voters against other state databases for accuracy dating back to January 2006.

Federal law required the state to have the database working and the checks under way in January 2006, but the database wasn't fully operational until Aug. 6, when the board began making the checks.
Van Hollen's suit asks Sumi to require the board to conduct the checks on all registrations since January 2006 and to knock ineligible voters off the rolls.

Accountabilty board officials say there have been more than 1 million registrations since then. Elections experts said if the suit is successful it could cause a lot of people to cast provisional ballots, possibly creating a post-election ballot-counting frenzy like Florida's after the 2000 presidential election.

Sumi set a hearing for Wednesday to discuss an accountability board motion to disqualify Van Hollen from the case on conflict of interest grounds. Justice officials said in court filings Thursday the department has "erected a wall" between lawyers working on the voting case and those defending the accountability board in other matters.

Also Thursday, Madison Teachers Inc., the American Federation of Teachers and a Madison fire fighters union indicated they want to intervene in the suit, said their lawyer, Ed Garvey. State Democrats are also want in.