Eugene Kane, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, writes about the importance of trust in a relationship.
It's been said that once trust goes out of a relationship, it's pretty much over.
What does that say about the state of Wisconsin politics these days?
At a public hearing on Gov. Scott Walker's two-year budget at State Fair Park on Monday, I talked to several people in attendance who didn't trust the Joint Finance Committee's decision to hold the event during daytime hours, when many working people were at their jobs.
Some suspected it was all a GOP plot to keep attendance low in the Milwaukee area for a hearing that was likely to draw thousands more if held at night.
Members of the Joint Finance Committee apparently didn't trust that local residents who registered to speak could keep their comments brief. A timekeeper kept reminding citizens about the 2-minute speaker's limit, including by holding up a sign when there were just 30 seconds remaining.
It's fair to say, after an election where both sides found reason to grumble, the mistrust factor is off the charts.
Democrats don't trust Walker when he says his budget-repair bill was designed to balance the budget and wasn't meant to kill public unions. Republicans don't trust Democrats, who they think are set on trying to paint the governor's proposed cost-cutting moves as disastrous to the state.
After last week's election, many voters weren't ready to trust the stunning news that 14,000 votes were mistakenly left out of the vote total in the state Supreme Court race in Waukesha County.
They didn't trust the electoral process enough to accept that it could have just been human error by a county clerk.
The main reason they felt that way was because they figured if the situation were reversed, the other side wouldn't trust them, either.
Kane acts as if the breakdown in trust in the relationship between the Democrats and Republicans in Wisconsin is a relatively recent development.
WRONG.
Conservatives have had reason to doubt the integrity of Wisconsin's elections for over a decade.
Democrats have shown they are untrustworthy and are willing to break the law to win.
In 2000, Constance Milstein used cigarettes to bribe the homeless in Milwaukee to vote for Al Gore.
A Park Ave. philanthropist accused of bribing homeless people in Milwaukee to vote for Al Gore in November has agreed to pay a $5,000 fine to settle her case.
Constance Milstein was in Milwaukee on the weekend before the Nov. 7 election to help Gore's presidential campaign drum up votes in hotly contested Wisconsin when a TV crew filmed her giving out packs of cigarettes, worth $3.25 each, to homeless men who had cast absentee ballots.
Prosecutors said that in handing out 10 packs of cigarettes, Milstein violated a Wisconsin election law that makes it a felony to induce someone to vote by providing anything worth more than $1.
But Kurt Benkley, an assistant district attorney for Milwaukee County, said prosecutors did not have enough evidence to file a criminal complaint against her because some witnesses had alcohol problems and many were difficult to locate.
Instead, the state filed a civil complaint.
Tim Metz, Milstein's spokesman, said, "She never had any idea she was doing anything wrong."
Of course, there are more documented cases to not trust Democrats to operate within legal limits.
Democrats attempted to suppress the vote in the 2004 presidential election when party workers slashed the tires twenty-five rented vans intended to transport voters to the polls on Election Day 2004.
Remember?
Michael Pratt, 33, and Lewis Caldwell, 29, were each sentenced to six months in jail while Lavelle Mohammad, 36, got five months and Sowande Omokunde, 26, got four months. Each was also fined $1,000. They will be eligible for work release and were allowed to surrender to begin their sentences within two weeks.
Pratt is the son of former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt and Omokunde is the son of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.)
There's more:
Read the 67-page "Report of the Investigation into the November 2, 2004 General Election in Milwaukee."
And there's the case of DEMOCRAT State Senate candidate Donovan Riley. That was certainly an embarrassment for the Dems. Riley actually voted twice in 2000, in the same election on the same day in both Wisconsin and Illinois. His excuse?
"My best recollection is that I was splitting my time between Wisconsin and Illinois, and it's possible I made a mistake."
That's not a "mistake." No one votes in one state and then crosses the border and votes again. Absolutely impossible. AND RILEY WAS A CANDIDATE FOR STATE SENATE!
Yes. Trust.
For me, that's been out of the political relationship in Wisconsin since the turn of the century, and with good reason.
Kane continues:
Which brings us to the ultimate sign of mistrust for some.
Republicans in Madison are proposing a photo ID bill to combat voter fraud that has often been couched in terms of giving the public more confidence in the electoral process.
After what happened in Waukesha County last week, it's fair to say voter confidence is probably at a low ebb. And as some pointed out, a photo ID bill would have done nothing to prevent the fiasco.
Judging from my recent mail, there is apparently a hard-core group of readers who get outraged whenever election officials in Republican strongholds are accused of wrongdoing but have no problem claiming residents of the Democratic-leaning inner city routinely commit voter fraud.
Predictably, Kane whips out the race card.
I think the guy should start talking to more people and quit relying on his mail to measure public sentiment. Kane makes generalizations based on some wacko mail. He's been doing it for years, rehashing the same old tripe.
Donovan Riley isn't an inner city resident. Voter fraud is not an inner city issue. Why bring race into this discussion at all? It's a distraction. It deflects from the real problem.
Kane concludes:
I think the results of last week's election demonstrated that most voters want their voices heard and will turn out in large numbers to exercise that right. We don't have to trust each other, but at the very least we have to trust that the system works.
Kane is right that the error made by Kathy Nickolaus would not have been prevented by voter photo ID.
But, it's an illogical leap for Kane to suggest that means such a system isn't useful in helping to clean up Wisconsin's elections.
I want to know how many people voted illegally on April 5th. How many same-day on-site registrations were bogus?
At present, I don't trust the present system to prevent fraud.
Because of our policies, Wisconsin is a voter fraud haven.
Fairness is what matters. That means one person, one vote.
Whatever steps are necessary to achieve that need to be taken.
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