| Post-election bitterness abounds in Milwaukee, and media-driven, partisan attacks have found their prime targets: not the Milwaukee Five charged with felony vandalism in the election eve tire-slashing, but the Milwaukee elections process and the city Elections Commission. The commission spent two January weeks bunkered down under a daily barrage from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, as the newspaper sought to prove that voting fraud was rampant in Milwaukee during the presidential election.
The Journal Sentinel tact in this election (remember the “Felons Voting” expose that followed the 2000 election?) has been to show through an analysis of voter verification cards that an unacceptable number of people were allowed to illegally register at the polls and vote on the day of the election. However, after two weeks of “Cardgate” speculation and an independent probe of the data, reporters at the daily came up next-to-empty.
Not that the lack of noteworthy -- or newsworthy -- results prevented the Journal Sentinel from running, with end-of-the-week finality, a screamer of a headline across the front page of its Friday, Jan. 28 edition: “City OK’d 1,305 flawed voter cards.”
A truckload of ink, multiple open records requests and much mathematical bickering with the Elections Commission at last came to rest on 1,305 suspicious-looking voter registration verification cards. The cards, sent by mail to voters who registered at the polls, had been returned as undeliverable or could not be processed and mailed. According to the Journal Sentinel, these cards contained wrong addresses, no addresses, and, in some cases, no names. With so much invested in Cardgate, they had to count for something, right? Wrong.
Those red-flagged 1,305 cards amount to 16 percent of the overall 8,300 verifications cards that Journal Sentinel estimates came back in the mail or could not be processed. The 16 percent in question comprise a wee 1.6 percent of an estimated 84,000 total registrations filed at the polls Nov. 2. This 1.6 percent in question represents an even wee-er, less than one-half of 1 percent (0.47 %) of the 277,535 Milwaukee votes counted in the presidential election.
The Cardgate investigation has thus far revealed that on a big turnout election day, when there were registration backups and long lines at polling places, one person out of every 213 voters somehow slipped through the process and was allowed to vote without completing a registration card. Cardgate has not revealed that people voted without showing utility bills and some form of identification, or that there was any intent to commit fraud; it only shows that 1.6 percent of same day registration forms were botched. One botch in every 213 overall votes cast.
Remember the “Felons Voting” scandal of 2000? That Journal Sentinel probe petered out when no intent to violate the law could be proven. (Stay tuned to WatchdogMilwaukee, dear reader. There was more than meets the eye to the “Felons Voting” investigation.)
Geraldo Rivera was responsible enough a few years ago to be embarrassed when he found nothing but shadows and mice in Al Capone’s vaults. He did not persist with an “Al Capone’s Vaults II” investigation into nothing – then continue the indignity by selling his story to viewers as though the new vaults were filled with gold.
Elections are still run by people in Wisconsin, at last check. Given human nature and any reasonable standard for the statistical probability of human foible and error, Cardgate is the last thing Mayor Tom Barrett’s elections task force should be looking into, not the first. No need to call in the Diebold Corp. There are more perfectly legal votes sitting in the House of Correction on any given election day in Milwaukee than there are in the Journal’s iota pile of suspicious Cardgate findings.
Yet we’re not likely to hear the end of Cardgate for some time. There is national attention on the Milwaukee vote. Wisconsin is the anti-Florida, the anti-Ohio, and President Bush can’t win here. As a result, Republicans are on the warpath, and the state’s progressive tradition of fair, equal and open access to polls is again under attack. GOP lawmakers insist there is “a hole in our same-day registration system.” The Journal Sentinel now has an over-invested interest in proving that Cardgate’s 0.47 percent matters; and the usual platoon of right wing radio jocks are howling up a storm about “elections fraud in Milwaukee.”
There are few things the Republican Party wants more than to clamp down on the voting process in Milwaukee.
The partisan nastiness behind Cardgate wore through the veneer of officialdom at the Elections Commission, where Commissioner Lisa Artison now icily tells reporters “there is an agenda at work here” and accuses the media (the Journal Sentinel) of participating in it. To clarify things for reporters, she took to reading the dictionary definitions of the word “estimate” at elections task force hearings. The task force met for the first time Jan. 21.
State Rep. Jeff Stone (R -- Greenfield), who took the lead for Republicans in criticizing the city, followed up by dutifully proposing a new law that would require voters to show ID cards at the polls. As the Legislature debated ID cards and this question of “elections fraud in Milwaukee” spilled into February, the Journal Sentinel continued to run the story on its front page. Gov. Doyle is expected to veto the legislation, if it is passed.
Meanwhile, the Cardgate 1,305 has a new home in the office of Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann, a Democrat. The investigation into criminal wrongdoing proceeds from there, and McCann, along with Doyle, will take over as the GOP’s prime target of attack. DA McCann, who in January announced the charges against the Milwaukee Five, including the sons of former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt and newly elected Congresswoman Gwen Moore, declined four years ago to prosecute the unwitting felons whom the Journal caught voting in the 2000 election.
Stay tuned as the Journal continues to extend and overextend its clout and credibility, although Cardgate has spared them little of either. When there is no story, the media becomes the story, and that’s what has happened in Cardgate, the elections controversy that wasn’t. Maybe it’s time for Geraldo to take the case.
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