Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board and Voter Fraud

The Government Accountability Board should change its name.

Where's the accountability?

It appears to be actively engaged in dodging its responsibility to clean up the voter rolls. It's shirking it's responsibility to guard against voter fraud in Wisconsin.

Election officials are likely to make about 18,000 people ineligible to vote because letters to them from the state were returned as undeliverable.

The state tried to contact the voters because their names, birth dates or driver's license numbers do not match information in other government databases. If marked as ineligible to vote in the voter database, they would have to re-register to vote with municipal clerks or at the polls before they could cast ballots.

About 42,500 other voters whose information does not match will remain eligible to vote, sparking frustration from critics. Federal law requires states to compare the state's voter database to state driver's license records and, in some cases, the Social Security Administration.

State officials spent the past 16 months trying to clean up information for 777,500 people who registered to vote between January 2006 and August 2008. They have verified information for most of those people, but data for about 66,500 voters still does not match.

Letters were sent to those voters, and 18,443 were returned as undeliverable, officials said Monday at a meeting of the state Government Accountability Board, which runs elections.

Local election clerks will be told to send those voters another letter and mark them as ineligible to vote on the state's voter list if the letters are again returned as undeliverable, said the board's director, Kevin Kennedy.

About 42,500 other voters did not respond to letters about their mismatched data. Thousands of others updated their information, but their data still does not match.

Those voters will remain eligible to vote. Board members said they should not - and some said they cannot - make people who do not respond to the letters ineligible to vote because of their constitutional right to vote.

But they also said they wanted to clear up the matches to boost confidence in the voter rolls.

"There's a perception out there that there's a lot of fraud because of the non-matches," board member Thomas Barland said.

Board members said they want to explore having poll workers talk to voters about their non-matching data when they come in to vote, but they said they have to study whether poll workers have time to perform such duties while trying to keep lines short on election day.

This is ridiculous.

What is the board's goal? To keep lines short on election day or to have an honest election?

It's as if members are arguing both goals are impossible to achieve. That's not the case, but if it were, having short lines should not take priority over preventing voter fraud.

I want my vote to count. I want to be confident in the integrity of the process. There's nothing satisfying about a short line if the entire exercise is a joke.

The Government Accountability Board should focus on how to clean up the voter rolls rather than making excuses for tens of thousands of potentially fraudulent voters and providing justification to maintain a fertile environment for disenfranchisement in Wisconsin.

I can't be sure my vote isn't being stolen by those intending to exploit Wisconsin's sloppy rolls. But who cares? As long as the lines aren't bad on election day, I'm happy.

That's nuts.

Bottom line: Wisconsin remains a haven for voter fraud. It's a disgrace.
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The Government Accountability Board has another disgrace on its hands -- the disenfranchisement of Wisconsin's military members and others living abroad.

 

What gives the Government Accountability Board the right to ignore the law?

It's not OK to put up hurdles for Wisconsin citizens in the military while enabling people with questionable identities to cast votes with ease.

Accountability?

I don't think so.

ALL candidates running for office in Wisconsin should be concerned about the board's incompetence.

If some candidates don't share that concern, that's very revealing.