In my post entitled, “18? Check! State ID? Check! Vote? Check! Or, maybe not...”, I was questioning why the votes of some newly registered and updated registered voters weren’t showing up on their voting histories yet, leading me to wonder if their votes really counted. One commenter, HudsonValleyMark, who has been a devil’s advocate of sorts, scrutinizing my posts, said this:
“I just find this very strange. Hacking the scanners would at least be parsimonious. Deciding that a bunch of voters should be treated as retroactively ineligible, somehow deleting their individual votes from the totals, and crossing them off the voter history update lists -- or whatever you think may have happened -- seems like a Keystone Kops approach to election fraud.”
Well, HudsonValleyMark, I’m sorry to have to disappoint you but yes, that is exactly what happens. I spoke with 2 election officials (from Madison) last week; one at the clerk’s office and one who is a poll worker, and was told the pretty much the same thing. This is my understanding of what I was told…
Registered voters who have moved within the same voting ward need only update their address using something like a piece of recent mail or a lease. No ID is required, nothing further needs to be done, and those people’s votes count right away (and forever). These votes will be added to those voters’ histories.
On the other hand, registered voters who have moved outside of their voting ward are treated as new registrations, in that their updated addresses have to be verified before their votes truly count. No ID is required, but there is still a verification process that has to occur before the vote is truly counted. This means the vote is counted at the time, but later may be taken away if the verification process does not come back with a match – and the votes will not be added to those people’s voting histories. I was told this verification process takes about 2 weeks. It’s been 7.
So, HudsonValleyMark, what you call “a Keystone Kops approach to election fraud” really does seem to be Wisconsin’s voter registration process.
I was also told by the Madison clerk’s office to wait a couple more weeks before starting to worry. However, my vote was listed on my history by July 5, 2012 – a full month after the election - and here we are 3 weeks later and still nothing for any of the new voters (or the one registered voter who needed to update her address) I personally watched vote…least of all my daughter, who voted in the same polling place at the same time I did, with a brand-spanking new, Official for Voting-And-Everything-Else, State-issued Wisconsin ID. She was already in the DMV system (how else could they pull up her information in a matter of seconds?); so yes, we’re wondering why it is taking so long to verify her identity and residence. And so should everyone else who was legal to vote but is not seeing that they voted in the June 5th recall election. Given that we don’t get any kind of receipt that we voted, being able to see that we voted in this (or any) election on the Voter Public Access site (which IS part of the SVRS) is the only proof we have that we did. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
There have been too many irregularities and differences in how this election was handled, and with the SVRS still in the hands of people I have yet to be convinced are on the up-and-up (see my posts “What do Enron and Wisconsin elections have in common?” and “Connecting the SVRS Dots: From Accenture to TAPFIN”), I think everyone should be concerned about the integrity of our elections…and especially the Walker recall election because of the implications it has on the upcoming presidential election. If election fraud occurred in the recall election (at least), we need to be VERY concerned it will happen in November 2012.
But, of course, that’s just my opinion.