Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Inaccurate voter rolls: It's all about photo ID

Charlie Sykes points out that the city has removed 105,000 names from the voting rolls, a staggering 23% of the total. The paper chose to place this on p.10B.

I suppose the rationale for treating this as a nonstory is the following observation by MJS reporter Greg Borowski:

The 105,000 names do not represent cases where people may have voted improperly in 2004, as they are the result of postcards being sent to people who have not voted in any election in the last four years

That's true but, as Borowski also points out, inaccurate voting lists are what we called in Catholic school "the occasion of sin." They make fraud possible. Borowski writes:

Election officials say an up-to-date list is a key safeguard against fraud, since it eliminates opportunities for people to potentially vote under the name of others who moved.

What the article doesn't explain is why this is so. So let's connect the dots.

It is because we don't require photo identification.

So here is what we know. The City of Milwaukee, at least, maintains wildly inaccurate voter rolls. It contains all sorts of people who have moved away or died.
Enterprising cheaters can go and vote in the name of those people with impunity because no one will ever ask them to prove who they are. You literally cannot be caught.

No one did this in the name of these 105,000. But how many more inaccurate names are on the list that were not removed because they were used as phantom voters?

The lack of curiousity regarding this on behalf of the Dems is staggering. They are either indifferent to fraud or in favor of it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I know for a fact that voting in the name of persons who have moved has gone on in Milwaukee. After the aldermanic primary in the spring of 2000, we recieved "thanks for voting" postcards from the incumbant. One was for someone I'd never heard of. We raised a bit of a stink at the time, but didn't realize what a valuable artifact it would become and did not retain the evidence.