The nut graf in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's story about some vote registration workers getting busted fundamentally misportrays the "voter fraud" debate that has rocked Milwaukee for the past four years. From the story:
But in a presidential election year, the incidents have revived partisan debate over Wisconsin’s voter registration rules, and over the question of whether requiring photo identification for voters would prevent fraud or suppress turnout.
The notion that the Republican Party of Wisconsin's opposition to voter ID is based on principled concern about fraud is fundamentally, if not willfully, wrong. If the RPW really was concerned about fraud, it would go after absentee voting (which, as Capper has pointed out elsewhere, is a source of GOP voter fraud). If the RPW really cared about the integrity of the vote it would not have declared loudly in 2004,just days before the election, that it had found 5,619 phantom voters on the rolls and called for those names to be purged. Almost all of those names wound up on that list as a result of a problem in the GOP's screening, as Milwaukee police investigators found (oddly, unlike Acorn, the RPW never acknowledged its list was riddled with problems). If they cared about the integrity of the ballot box they wouldn't have intimidated voters in the 2004 election. And if the RPW really cared about an honest vote, it would not have urged the White House to fire Steven M. Biskupic for not pursuing bogus voter fraud cases.
Indeed, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel does its reader a grave disservice by not pointing out to its readership that the RPW's support of Voter ID fits in with a broader GOP effort to suppress the vote, as the firing of U.S. attorneys and other Justice Department shenanigans revealed.
No. The reason the RPW is pressing for Voter ID is because it knows -- or strongly suspects --that it could suppress turnout among people who don't typically vote for them, particularly minorities. Saying they're concerned about fraud is just a pleasing cover story, given they invoke it in response to anyproblem at the polls regardless of whether it would have helped.
This is not difficult to understand. So why can't the Journal Sentinel figure it out? Is it because the Journal Sentinel spun so hard to find voter fraud a few years back? Does it find it uncomfortable to point out that one of the state's political parties is actively trying to suppress the vote?
No, it's because MJS has become even more conservative and are OK with the agenda of RPW.
For the record, and to help the slower, right wing reader, here is where I lay out my argument about absentee balloting:
http://folkbum.blogspot.com/2008/03/fallacy-behind-voter-id.html
Posted by: capper | August 21, 2008 at 05:50 AM