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CARDGATE: THE ELECTIONS COMMISSION NON-CONTROVERSY
by John-David Morgan
1.28.2004
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 has at last come 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 has worn 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.
The Cardgate
1,305 will soon get a new home in the office of Milwaukee County
District Attorney E. Michael McCann, a Democrat. The investigation
into criminal wrongdoing will proceed from there, and McCann will
take over as the GOP’s prime target of attack. With their
“expose” in the district attorney’s hands, how will the
Journal extend its clout and credibility, if Cardgate has spared the
daily any of either?
DA McCann, who
last week 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.
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