Now that Wisconsin’s recent judicial election has at long last been settled in Prosser’s favor, there is no doubt who is really to blame for the problems that resulted in erroneous reporting which gave a narrow lead for the defeated liberal candidate. In the only truly non-partisan, non-ideological study of its kind, a special task force of the Milwaukee Police Department concluded that massive fraud and incompetence existed in Wisconsin’s election system. Republicans were eager to reform the system, but most Democrats refused to even discuss it. Despite the Democrats’ failure to act, no Democrat or liberal ever refuted the substance of the study, nor did they make any effort even to address the incompetence issue.
Why would the Democrats want to allow the incompetence in the system to stand? A cynic would say it would allow fraud to continue. In the police study, the police task force found that 16 staffers for the Democrat presidential campaign and a liberal allied group committed felony vote fraud and engaged in an “illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome of an election in the state of Wisconsin.”
Yet not one was prosecuted.
Prosecutors concluded that prosecution was impossible because
[b]ased on the investigation to date, the task force has found widespread record keeping failures and separate areas of voter fraud. These findings impact each other. Simply put: it is hard to prove a bank embezzlement if the bank cannot tell how much money was there in the first place. Without accurate records, the task force will have difficulty proving criminal conduct beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
In essence, because of the high level of incompetence in Wisconsin’s election administration, prosecuting those who committed “multiple felonies” of vote fraud was impossible.
Wisconsin Democrats could have joined with Republicans to ensure that elections are more open, fair, and honest, but Democrats opposed transparency and favored systems that encourage fraud like “Same Day Registration,” which employs tactics like vouching for votes. This encourages incompetence, making record keeping difficult and committing fraud easy. If Democrats had worked with Republicans to reform the system, then the April 5 Supreme Court election would have undoubtedly been over on election night.
Ironically, Democrats who have failed to address vote fraud and election administration incompetence are now crying foul. If the Democrats want to stick to facts, there is no evidence that any fraud was committed in Waukesha County, the center of the controversy. Experts for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and even the liberal New York Times have concluded that it was a matter of incompetence in reporting, not fraud in voting, that resulted in the 7,500 vote error.
Of course, a more open election system would have forced the Republican election official to report totals on a city basis, which would have prevented this problem.
Yet, if you had to impose such requirements on Republican counties, you would also have to do the same in Democrat counties, which would likely present the Democrats with some other problems as suspicious vote totals were detected in the Democratic stronghold of Dane County. While Waukesha current vote totals are in line with models, in some precincts in ultra-liberal Madison as many as 40% of voters only voted for judge — an extremely high number that is not seen even in voting for president. Were some of these “voters” the same type of out of state activists detailed by the aforementioned police report that illegally voted in 2004? After all, the police concluded that possibly “thousands” of activists illegally voted that time. This time, we know that many non-Wisconsin-resident, Democrat, union, and liberal activists were working in Madison to overthrow Governor Walker’s agenda, which they failed to do through protests and intimidation. Did these out-of-staters vote in the judicial election illegally? Or do many Madison cheeseheads, unlike every other place in Wisconsin and America, only care about who serves on their Supreme Court?
Speaking of intimidation, one of the victims of this debacle is 80-year-old Romana Kitzinger, the Democrat official who strongly stood behind the corrected vote total in a press conference after the election. ”We went over everything and made sure all the numbers jibed up and they did,” she said. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you something that’s not true.” But now it seems Romana has been pressured into partially recanting — and, while not talking to the press anymore, issuing a statement with the help of the Democrat Party.
A more open and transparent process would have stopped the problems in Waukesha, but it would also make intimidation and fraud more difficult. Will Democrats work to end incompetence and fraud plaguing voting systems like Wisconsin’s? Until they do, the conclusion of one of those investigator police officers of that famous Milwaukee report will still be valid: “I know I voted in the Election, but I can’t be certain it counted.”
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