More Shenanigans In Milwaukee?

After the 2004 election, widespread claims of voter fraud arose from the close election results in our neighboring state of Wisconsin. At the time, the claims focused on the lax voter registration laws in Wisconsin that apparently allowed for massive overvoting in the critical precincts of Milwaukee. Over 4500 ballots got cast over the number of ballots that Milwaukee recorded as voting in that election, calling into question the reliability of the razor-thin margin of victory by John Kerry of 11,000 votes overall.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel did an excellent job of reporting the shenanigans in 2005, leading to an investigation that ended up going nowhere. The county, state, and federal governments could reach no real conclusion as to the existence of fraud, despite the obvious imbalance in votes versus the records. Now a blogger on the Left has discovered what three levels of government investigators could not (via Memeorandum):

The Optech IIIP Eagle optical scanner claims it scanned 1219 ballots. On the poll book certification page, the poll workers checking in voters and handing out blank ballots claim they handed 1071 ballots to electors. On the Inspectors’ reports with the forged signatures, it is claimed only 981 ballots were handed to electors. If I believe the machine and the poll book, then the ballot box in Ward One was stuffed with 148 extra ballots. If I believe the machine and the apparently forged inspectors’ report, the ballot box is stuffed with 238 extra ballots. If I ignore the machine altogether, the ballot box is stuffed with 90 extra ballots.
This leads to several questions.
1. How many ballots are currently sealed in the ballot bag for Ward One; 1219 ballots, 1071 ballots, 981 ballots, or some other number of ballots? Has anyone checked? Ever?
2. How is it that this anomaly was never discovered after two years of “investigation” by the Joint Task Force of the FBI, Milwaukee Police department, the Milwaukee county District Attorney and the US Attorney for Eastern Wisconsin? What have US Attorney Biskupic and the County District Attorneys E. Michael McCann and John Chisholm been doing for two years if such clear statute violations were missed?

John Washburn, guest-blogging at Brad’s Blog, has more questions about the implications of this discovery, but there are more still. It took months for Washburn to receive the materials from a FOIA request; he got stalled by excuses of materials transfers between agencies. Now that Washburn has the materials, it hardly seems credible that the joint investigation could reasonably shrug off the complaints. The election inspectors signed their names as “Jane Smith”, “Judy Doe”, and “John Doe”, and as mentioned before, the numbers are quite a bit off from the optical-scan machines, which should be highly accurate.
John asks who benefits from the apparent ballot-stuffing in this one ward. Given that Milwaukee has a strong Democratic registration advantage and that the electoral mechanics in that county are controlled by Democrats, I’d find it extremely unlikely that it represents a Republican conspiracy. Democrats needed a wide margin of victory for Kerry in Milwaukee to overcome the advantage Republicans have in most of the rest of the state — and it seems as though some people were determined to maximize that margin through any means necessary.
However, no one can prove this, because we rightly do not match ballots to names. We rely on strict accounting to ensure a fair election with fair results. Regardless of who tried to game the system, all citizens should be demanding a new investigation into Milwaukee’s 2004 election, who ran it, and most importantly who corrupted it. After that, we need to find out why the last investigation failed to proceed with charges against the officials in this ward that falsified the controls.
John says that “it is the duty of sovereign citizens to watch public officials vigilantly and eternally.” He’s right.

Dems Admit Election-Day Sabotage

Four of five Democratic activists charged with election-day sabotage took an eleventh-hour plea deal that convicted them of misdemeanors for slashing tires on GOP-rented vans on Election Day 2004. Despite doing over $5,000 worth of damage and perhaps keeping hundreds of voters from getting to the polls, the quartet will not have to serve any prison time in exchange for their guilty pleas (via The American Mind, who has a good roundup of reaction):

In an unexpected twist in the Election Day tire-slashing trial, four former Kerry-Edwards campaign staffers, including the sons of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) and former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, have agreed to plead no contest to misdemeanors.
The plea agreements came in the middle of jury deliberations after an eight-day trial on felony property damage charges that carried potential 3 1/2 year prison terms upon conviction. The fifth defendant in the case was acquitted by the jury later in the afternoon.
Michael Pratt, 33, Sowande Omokunde, 26, Lewis G. Caldwell, 29, and Lavelle Mohammad, 36, have all pleaded no contest to misdemeanor counts of criminal damage to property. Omokunde is Moore’s son.
Prosecutors will recommend probation sentences as part of the deal, and that the four together pay $5,317 in restitution for the damaged tires.

In light of the acquittal of the fifth defendant, some might think that the prosecutor made the right decision in offering the plea. It puts the Democrats on record as admitting to electoral fraud; it guarantees that these four men will have a police record and will make it difficult for them to continue playing any significant role in politics, at least in the near term; and it closes a case with some kind of conviction, as opposed to the mistrial or outright acquittal towards which it appeared to be heading.
I agree that shifting down to a misdemeanor may well serve the overall interest of justice, but not a lack of jail time. Wisconsin, like Minnesota and a number of other states, have lax registration requirements and even less rigorous enforcement of the law and investigation into fraud. When something this blatant arises, it calls for strict prosecution and an example for others tempted to try it again. This was no mere act of youthful vandalism — it was a crime against people who could not get themselves to the polls to vote, by the party that claims to care for the helpless and disadvantaged. It also appears to have been a conspiracy of sorts, as it involved quite a few of the lower-level Democratic activists, two of whom have parents as elected representatives. That kind of betrayal should have resulted in more than just restitution and community service.
The judge does have the discretion to reject the terms of the deal, or to accept the pleas but still include some jail time. Let us hope that the judge in this case values the credibility of the electoral system more highly than the prosecutor, and certainly more highly than the well-connected defendants who will appear for final sentencing later.

Wisconsin Voter Fraud Gets Congressional Attention

The widespread allegations of voter fraud in Wisconsin from last year’s presidential election, the level of which may have fraudulently pushed the state into John Kerry’s Electoral College column, will finally receive some attention from Congress. Greg Borowski reported on Wednesday that the House Administration Committee would come to Milwaukee to hear from witnesses. However, one member of the delegation has some eyebrows raised (h/t: CQ reader A Guy In Wisconsin):

The meeting of the House Administration Committee, which oversees election issues, will put the state’s election system under a potentially powerful microscope.
But the visit was criticized Tuesday amid questions about whether any Democratic members would attend. There also were questions about the witness list, heavy with Republicans and – for now – without Milwaukee representation.
The committee chairman, Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), said Tuesday that he was told Rep. Gwen Moore, a Milwaukee Democrat, would be sitting in.
Moore is not on the committee, but Ney said she would be able to testify and join the committee in questioning witnesses. The three Democrats on the nine-member committee all have conflicts and will not attend. Apparently, they had not submitted any witnesses they wanted called.

Rep. Mark Green made the request to get more attention on the case, which has languished since Mayor Tom Barrett appointed an investigatory board of city, state, and federal officials to look into the allegations. (My case archive on this can be found here.) The state Democratic Party Chairman, Joe Weineke, takes a dim view of the proceedings, claiming that they amount to nothing more than a political stunt and “road show” for Green, a Republican. Weineke wants to know why the witness list doesn’t include more Democrats. Perhaps he should consider himself lucky at not having to explain why more of them won’t be subpoenaed.
The inclusion of Rep. Gwen Moore has some people scratching their heads. After all, the Democratic Congresswoman has a significant connection to these allegations. Her son Sowande Omokunde, also known by the memorable name of Supreme Solar Allah, got charged with felonious vandalism in an Election Day tire-slashing incident meant to keep Republicans from going to the polls:

The investigation into the Great Tire-Slashing Caper will end Monday with felony charges against the adult sons of two prominent Milwaukee politicians – U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore and former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt.
Sources close to the 83-day-old probe said Sowande Omokunde, Michael Pratt and three other paid Democratic activists will each be charged with a single felony count of criminal damage to property, legalese for vandalism.
Omokunde, also known as Supreme Solar Allah, is the 25-year-old son of the rookie congresswoman. Pratt, 32, worked on Kerry’s local campaign, which was chaired by his father.
Pratt, Omokunde and the other staffers will be accused of cutting the tires of some 20 vans and cars rented by the state Republican Party to usher the party faithful to and from the polls on election day. The charges will state that the damage to the vehicles was well in excess of $2,500 – the minimum required to merit a felony.

With that in mind, having Moore taking part as an investigator instead of a witness reminds me of having Jamie Gorelick serve on the 9/11 Commission. In fact, it might be worse. Supreme faces trial next year, and given her personal and professional connections to him, Moore could wind up as a witness or even as a possible accessory in the case. She refuses to answer questions about the case, so why should she be in a position to ask questions about other voter-fraud incidents in Wisconsin?
It appears that the Democrats want the cheesewash to continue.

WaPo Smells The Cheese … Finally

The Washington Post has finally sniffed out the Silence of the Cheese, the voter-fraud scandal in Milwaukee that helped turn Wisconsin blue in the 2004 Presidential election. Michelle Malkin points readers to a new development that the Post reported late this afternoon:

About 4,500 more ballots than registered voters were cast in the election last November in Milwaukee, investigators said Tuesday.
Also, more than 200 felons voted improperly in Milwaukee, and more than 100 instances of suspected double-voting were found.
No charges have been filed. Investigators found no widespread conspiracy, just isolated incidents, U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic said.
“I don’t think there’s an election in this municipality or this state that would have been decided differently even with those numbers,” said Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democrat.

Barrett wants this entire embarassment to go away, and the spin is designed for the national media to go back into silence mode. Having 4,500 more ballots than registered voters doesn’t mean that 4500 extra votes were cast. It means many more thousands of extra votes were cast, unless Milwaukee normally gets 100% turnout for every election. Milwaukee had over 277,000 ballots cast in the election, and even if that accounted for 90% of the registered voters in the city, it would still mean 30,000 extra ballots before you even get to an overage.
Now, given that kind of turnover in balloting, the notion that all of that activity came from “isolated incidents” makes no sense whatsover. Someone had to cast those extra ballots, and if it was just ordinary Milwaukee citizens, it would mean that one in nine voters double-voted on Election Day. Perhaps the investigators could find no evidence of a conspiracy, but that hardly means that one didn’t exist. The sheer scale fraudulent voting in this case almost certainly eliminates all other explanations.
John Kerry’s surprise 11,000-vote margin in a state most Upper Midwest political pundits picked for Bush now appears much more understandable. While it’s far too late to challenge the 2004 results, Wisconsonites should ensure that such fraud cannot occur again. The first step should be to demand photo-ID at the polling stations and the end to same-day registrations. Those politicians who oppose such reforms should be seen as enablers of voter fraud, and handled accordingly.
UPDATE: The Washington Post blew its reporting, as CQ commenter Outactrl points out. The actual report, available here in PDF format, says that 4500 more ballots came in than Milwaukee recorded as voting, not 4500 more than the number of registered voters in Milwaukee. However, let’s not forget that over 30% of the 277,000 votes came from same-day registrations, which Milwaukee has yet to reconcile.

Doyle Promises Veto On ID Requirement

After the ongoing debacle in Milwaukee’s past election in November, when for the second straight presidential cycle more than 30% of the voters registered at the polls and instigated a federal investigation into fraud, one would assume that adding a requirement for photo identification would be seen as a reasonable response. The only one who appears to reject that notion in Wisconsin is the Democratic governor, Jim Doyle, who threatened to veto the bill passed by the legislature today:

Wisconsin lawmakers passed a bill Wednesday that would require voters to provide a driver’s license or other government-issued photo identification before casting a ballot. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle said he would veto the measure. …
Wisconsin Republicans who pushed the measure through both houses of the Legislature say the photo ID requirement would lessen voter fraud and protect legitimate voters.
Democrats said the bill threatened the constitutional right to vote for thousands of poor and elderly who lack photo IDs and broke with the tradition of Wisconsin, long known for its high turnout and Election-Day voter registration.

It’s known for its Election Day registrations, all right, but only on presidential elections. Milwaukee especially has a track record of anomalous registration activity. They exceeded thirty percent of all votes coming from same-day registrations in two successive presidential elections, but failed to come close to that in the off-year elections in between. In order to accept that as a normal result, one has to presume that one-third of Milwaukee’s adult population moves every four years, and that this mass migration coincides with presidential elections.
At least, that’s what Jim Doyle expects Wisconsin voters to believe – not that their open voting system invites fraud and mismanagement, effectively degrading the legitimate vote of honest Wisconsin citizens. Despite including provisions for free ID cards for low-income voters, Doyle wants to pretend that the entire legislature wants to oppress the 2.4% of Wisconsin residents who don’t have state photo IDs. Perhaps the other 97.6% of Wisconsinites can tell Governor Doyle where to put that veto pen before he uses it.

Milwaukee Election Official Resigns

CQ reader Joe K brings me up to date on a story line that has gone quiet the past couple of weeks. The embattled head of elections for Milwaukee responsible for the fiasco of last year’s presidential balloting has abruptly resigned after spending the last month on sick leave:

Under a blitz of criticism over the city’s handling of the Nov. 2 presidential election, Lisa Artison resigned Tuesday as executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission after four weeks off the job on sick time.
Artison faxed a one-sentence note of resignation to the mayor’s office Tuesday. She could not be reached for comment.
In recent days, speculation grew that Artison would leave the post she held since July, when she faced sharp questions about her qualifications from aldermen at her confirmation hearing.

Her mysterious resignation probably has to do with the independent investigation launched by a combination of the state legislature, the local DA, and the FBI. Artison started taking her assigned sick days shortly after the mayor’s committee on the Election Day fiasco — on which Artison inexplicably got to sit — got superceded by the new independent panel. City officials get 30 days of sick leave and earn more as the year progresses, based on service, and it’s pretty apparent that Artison saw the writing on the wall after she and her patron, Mayor Tom Barrett, lost control of the investigation.
Next item for Milwaukee residents: an explanation of how Barrett chose Artison in the first place. Her selection last summer to this post stirred up controversy as Artison had no experience other than as a Barrett campaign volunteer and being the wife of a local talk-show host. She barely made it past her confirmation with the aldermen, squeaking by on a 9-6 vote. The six opposing her now look like geniuses, and Barrett should be held accountable for handing out important appointments to unqualified people in order to curry favor with local opinion-makers.

Anti-Reform Wisconsin Governor Took Large Payments After Health-Care Merger

Democratic Governor Jim Doyle has repeatedly blocked electoral reform in Wisconsin and threatens to do so again if the state legislature passes a requirement for photo IDs at polling stations. Doyle vetoed the measure once before in 2003 and promises the same this year, even after the fiasco in Milwaukee last November in which an inordinate amount of people registered to vote on Election Day (over 30% of all voters).
Now, however, Wisconsin voters may have another kind of reform in mind after the Journal-Sentinel revealed that executives involved in a controversial health-care merger gave Doyle over $28,000 in donations shortly after he allowed the merger to go through. Critics at the time wondered why Doyle didn’t ask for common-sense economic concessions — and now they think they know:

Gov. Jim Doyle received $28,500 in campaign donations late last year, near the time a major insurance company merger was finalized, from the firms’ top executives, their spouses and former executives, state records show.
The money came on top of more than $47,000 in contributions top officials of the Wellpoint and Anthem insurance companies have given Doyle since his 2002 run for governor. The figure also includes contributions from executives at Blue Cross & Blue Shield United of Wisconsin, which was acquired by Wellpoint in 2003.
The latest batch of cash for Doyle was given just before and after the huge Wellpoint-Anthem merger was finalized Nov. 30. The Doyle administration has been criticized for allowing the merger without getting monetary concessions from the merged company. The $20 billion merger created the largest health insurer in the United States.
The biggest givers were Wellpoint Chairman Leonard Schaeffer and his wife, Pamela, of Westlake Village, Calif. They gave Doyle a combined $18,500 on Dec. 27. Pamela Schaefer’s $10,000 donation – the maximum permitted under Wisconsin law – was her first to Doyle.
Leonard Schaeffer, who earlier had given Doyle $1,500, also hit the maximum with his $8,500 gift. Aside from those donations, the Schaeffers have never given to any Wisconsin state candidates, according to a campaign contribution database dating to 1993 that is maintained by the non-profit Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

These donations do not appear to have broken any laws, although the timing strongly suggests some sort of payoff. All of the money came in November, an odd time to donate to Doyle, who doesn’t run for re-election until 2006. Why would these executives and their families max out their hard-cash donations to Doyle two years before the election? It certainly looks like the timing with which the Schaeffers were concerned have more to do with what Doyle did for them in November 2004 than what Doyle wants to do in November 2006.
Wisconsinites should realize that Jim Doyle doesn’t want to solve electoral fraud in their state. It appears that he wants to continue profiting from it, figuratively and literally. Wisconsin voters need to make plain that they will hold legislators responsible for overriding Doyle’s veto, especially those in Doyle’s own party.

Requiring Voter ID Disenfranchises Voters: Wisconsin Dems

The debate on fixing Wisconsin’s broken electoral system moved to the state legislature yesterday, where hearings opened on a bill that would require a state or military photo ID to verify identification of voters at polling stations. As expected, the Democrats lined up as many people as possible to whine about the extraordinary burden of carrying identification:

Earlier this week, leaders in the Republican-controlled Legislature revived a bill similar to one vetoed by Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle in 2003 that would have required voters to show a valid photo ID to register and vote. It would alter Wisconsin’s historically open elections process, which allows residents to vote by providing their names and addresses to poll workers, and register on election day by presenting proof of residence. …
Most people would show a driver’s license to vote, but a state-issued identification card or military ID would also be accepted. The state would offer free IDs to those who don’t have them or can’t afford them, under the bill.
The proposed legislation would also eliminate the practice of “vouching,” which allows eligible voters to cast a ballot if another person can confirm their identity and address.

So Wisconsin will allow two different kinds of state ID or a military ID card, and will even supply such ID for free? Sounds like a no-brainer to me. Unfortunately, the no-brainers showed up to complain about this perfectly reasonable compromise:

Karla Smith of Madison, who uses a wheelchair, told lawmakers that the measure would disenfranchise disabled people, because they would have trouble lining up transportation to get an ID.

So Karla Smith has no problem lining up transportation to go to the polls on Election Day, but somehow can’t seem to make it to the DMV on any other day out of the year? Give me a break. How does she cash checks? She can’t do any banking without having some kind of ID. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and others don’t just allow people to withdraw money from accounts by bringing someone in with them to “vouch” for their identity.
But the Democrats didn’t stop at exploiting the handicapped by playing on pity. They also pulled out their favorite victims of our runaway capitalist society:

Rep. Joe Parisi (D-Madison), the former Dane County clerk, said getting rid of the vouching system would make it virtually impossible for homeless people to vote.

First off, the homeless have no residence by definition, and so should have no ability to register — since one has to establish residence in a precinct to be eligible to vote there. Some areas have adopted the rule that homeless people can use city buildings for addresses to register and vote. If they can do that, then why not just allow them to get a photo ID (it’s free, remember) using the same address? Because the Democrats know most of them won’t bother to do so, and that will hamper the party’s ability to round them up by offering them cigarettes on Election Day to vote Democratic.
All in all, the Democrats have performed shamefully by exploiting the people they hold up as victims in order to protect their network of petty electoral frauds. Wisconsin voters should understand that the Democrats now actively work to dilute the votes of bona fide voters by forcing the system to accept anyone who walks up to the polls on the buddy system. They need to express their disgust in the next elections, and hope that the Magic Buses don’t throw yet another electoral contest.

Milwaukee Had 17 Precincts With 100+ More Votes Than Voters

Greg Borowski reports in today’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that an analysis of voting records done by the newspaper reveals that seventeen precincts in the city showed at least 100 more votes than the number of registered voters, even counting the already-problematic same-day registrants. Four precincts, or wards, had more than 500 extra votes:

Record-keeping surrounding the Nov. 2 presidential election in Milwaukee is so flawed that in 17 wards there were at least 100 more votes recorded than people listed by the city as voting there.
In two wards, one on the south side and one on the north side, the gap is more than 500, with fewer than half the votes cast in each ward accounted for in the city’s computer system, a Journal Sentinel review has found.
Such gaps were present at different levels in nearly all of the city wards and could hamper the investigation launched last week by federal and local authorities into possible voter fraud by giving an incomplete or inaccurate picture of who actually voted.
They also raise questions about the level of oversight of how the city records who voted in each ward – an important safeguard that, properly done, can be used to spot double voting and other problems.
And unless the gaps can be fully resolved, they leave room for critics to allege that ballot boxes were stuffed in the city, which went heavily to Democrat John Kerry over President Bush in a state with one of the closest margins in the country.

Milwaukee has 312 voting wards, and the MSJ checked the records to see if it could find a pattern of abuse. It didn’t find a geographic pattern, although Sean Hackbarth at The American Mind seems to note a couple of interesting items when he checks his map:

From looking at the Journal Sentinel’s map of the really messed up wards we see them scattered across the city. The only real concentration was in the far north side, wards 258, 259, and 260. Combined those three wards had 490 more ballots cast than voters listed as voting. Such a concentration could mean a concerted fraud effort was happening in that area. Three wards that also caught my eye: Ward 312 at Marquette University, Ward 39 at UW-Milwaukee, and Ward 44 near UWM. Wards where university students votes makes me suspicious because in 2000 Marquette University students bragged about voting more than once. One of the admitted polling places was Marquette Alumni Memorial Union, Ward 312. These are wards investigators should look at first.

Most of the problem appears to have been a highly careless election staff that didn’t bother to scan the election logs, or failed to include them altogether. This is the important safeguard that the MSJ reports was ignored altogether, and it bolsters the notion that systemic fraud may be a secondary explanation, behind incompetence. It resulted in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unrecorded votes as well; Borowski and the MSJ staff found 593 in one ward alone. Lisa Artison could not comment on this development as she was out of the office yesterday, but that’s still not good news for her or the bureaucracy she leads.
So now on top of an outrageously high number of same-day registrants (30% of Milwaukee’s total for the second presidential election in a row), we have a casual and haphazard counting and verification process to add to a casual and haphazard registration process. The bill attempting to mitigate the latter faces stiff Democratic opposition, and the Democrats have their usual ally in camp for the battle:

On Tuesday, Rick Graber, head of the state Republican Party, challenged his Democratic counterpart to appear at a hearing on the matter Thursday so together they can condemn “the fact that potentially thousands of voters across Wisconsin had their legally cast ballot disenfranchised by fraud and abuse.”
Linda Honold, state Democratic Party chair, said she was unsure if she would attend the meeting but added that if she did go, she would do so to oppose the bill.
“If I’m there, I’m not going to be arguing what he wants me to argue,” she said.
Others, including the head of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin and the group Wisconsin Citizen Action, condemned the voter ID proposal.

The Democrats appear united in trying to protect their power base and the easily-manipulated system which keeps them in statewide office. The ACLU can be relied upon to oppose any kind of ID scheme, no matter how reasonable, especially when it favors the Democrats. Perhaps the ACLU could explain why presenting a valid ID on Election Day make voting “harder” for qualified voters, since most people drive to the polls and should have it on them anyway. Those who do not drive can inexpensively get a state photo ID that works just as well and remains valid just as long, and if they write checks in most places, already need. The only people who find it “harder” to vote when ID is required are the people who don’t belong in the polling station in the first place.
It appears that Milwaukee’s fiasco has many dimensions to it, and both fraud and incompetence remain as root causes. The independent investigation into the city’s practices promises to cause an uproar when completed. Stay tuned.

Milwaukee Election Fraud May Still Not Convince Dem Governor On Reform

Wisconsin voters who have reacted with alarm and outrage over the incompetence and probable fraud in the Milwaukee election. State legislators also want to ensure that this fiasco doesn’t repeat itself, and plan on introducing a new requirement for a state-issued photo ID to cast a ballot. Unfortunately for the real voters, the Democratic governor apparently wants to keep the system just the way it is:

The mounting evidence this week of irregularities in Milwaukee has caused concern around Wisconsin that will result in new pressure for reform, said Rep. Jeff Stone (R-Greendale), one of the authors of the photo ID bill, which is to be introduced Monday.
State residents may worry about their votes being, in effect, negated because of questions surrounding thousands of votes in Milwaukee, he said.

Lawmakers tried tightening the security on elections in 2003, but Governor Jim Doyle vetoed the bill. The Assembly did not have the votes to override the veto, and with Doyle openly opposing the bill in this session, no one knows of any new votes to override his expected encore with the veto pen.
The bill now has 30 co-sponsors and the momentum of a scandal to put pressure on Doyle, but one has to wonder why he would support voting reform. After all, Milwaukee is the Democratic power base for Wisconsin; Kerry topped Bush by over 120,000 votes in 277,000 cast, when he only won the state by 11,000. Restoring sanity to elections in Wisconsin would do nothing to change the political environment in Milwaukee, but it could have a devastating effect on Democrats running for state office — like Doyle’s.
It appears that these calculations weigh heavily on Doyle’s mind, instead of ensuring fair and competent elections for his constituents. Wisconsin residents should express their sentiments directly to Doyle and their Assembly representatives to make sure they understand that Doyle’s calculations represent bad math, bad policy, and bad politics.