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Opinion: Election-fraud cases pile up

From the Jan. 10, 2010 CSI Walworth County Sunday "The Way we see it" column:

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett once mocked an interviewer who asked him to address allegations that his city is a hotbed of election-related cheating. Barrett, the reluctant Democratic candidate for governor, asked the interviewer for the name -- “just one name,” he sneered -- of someone alleged to have committed vote fraud.

Since then, there have been a number of names -- convictions, too -- and now there are five more. State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen announced felony charges Monday against five people who are accused of fraud during the 2008 presidential election in Milwaukee. Two of those charged worked for the scandal-plagued community-organizing group ACORN, the one-time employer of the current occupant of the White House.

The Fraud Five are charged with such crimes as double voting, felon voting and providing false information to election officials, who themselves have been demonstrably negligent in the enforcement of election law in the state’s largest city.

The same day the charges were announced, a sublimely coincidental report from The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel alleged the city’s police department has stalled investigation of widespread voter fraud in the 2008 general election. Given that this is Tom “just one name” Barrett’s police department, one might reasonably wonder whether the mayor is clamping down on a probe that might further expose him as an irresponsible vote-fraud denier.

There is, of course, a way out of the darkness. Requiring state residents to have an official photo-identification card before entering the voting booth would go a long way toward restoring confidence that ACORN, among others, is not gaming the system in Wisconsin. Democrats, however, have consistently rejected legislative initiatives to implement a voter ID law.

State residents who routinely produce an ID to cash a check should ask themselves why a similar requirement doesn’t protect their ballot. The answer seems obvious when you consider who benefits in Wisconsin from vote fraud. Every case in recent years involves Democratic operatives or those connected in some way with the party or its front organizations, like ACORN. Expect that to continue if Barrett ends up in the governor’s mansion.

Read more on the Outlook and Perspective pages of CSI's Walworth County Sunday e-edition on pages 8A and 9A. and add your comments below.