The Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen (R) has filed a suit that could remove as many as 20 percent of Wisconsin voters from the registration database and force them to cast provisional ballots in the November election
Saying illegal Wisconsin votes could sway the presidential election, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has sued the state elections agency to force ineligible voters off the rolls.
But election experts warned that if the Justice Department lawsuit is successful, eligible voters could be disenfranchised and the state could face a post-election ballot-counting frenzy similar to Florida's after the 2000 presidential race.
More after the fold.
The state's computerized voter registration system is finally online 2 years late and tests have shown that up to 20% of the registrations contain errors when checked against data from other state agencies such as the DoT. These errors are mostly typos and misspellings but Van Hollen wants all registrations with errors removed from the database.
Van Hollen asks the court to force the Government Accountability Board to check voter registrations for accuracy dating back to Jan. 1, 2006, when the state was supposed to be in compliance with the federal Help America Vote Act.
But the state missed that deadline and Van Hollen argues new voters were able to register without undergoing the federally required accuracy check.
The board said last month that it had finally reached compliance with the law, which is designed to ensure that only eligible voters' ballots are counted at the polls. The board also said it would only check new registrations for accuracy dating to Aug. 6.
The board last month found that information contained on more than 20 percent of recent voter registrations failed to match information maintained on state Department of Transportation records such as names and addresses, mostly because of variations in how a name was used, typographical errors or incompatibilities in the two agencies' databases. Even information from four of six Accountability Board members in the voter database failed to match DOT records.
Mark Jefferson, executive director of the state GOP, said, "The Government Accountability Board is not taking the HAVA law seriously. Thankfully, the attorney general is."
Joe Wineke, chairman of the state Democratic Party, said the suit is a "cynical attempt to disenfranchise voters" and part of a GOP pattern to "distract and deny voters with fearmongering."
UPDATE: As have been poointed out in the comments, Wisconsin does have Same Day Registration, but you need to have a bank statement or utility bill or some recent piece of mail with your address on it to register. Realisticly speaking, if you thought you were registered, would you take something like that with you when you came in to vote? How many people do you think would just go away and not vote instead of going home to get their electric bill and come all the way back again?