The Wisconsin Attorney's General's attempt to frustrate and suppress an expected record voter turn-out is drawing the heat from a wide cross section of Wisconsin citizens.
It's not just the bloggers.
Opposition to vote suppression includes the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB), the Democratic Party and even the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The GOP knows the only way it will win Wisconsin is to frustrate the efforts of voters to: Vote.
And it knows the score and inning: The GOP needs Wisconsin to reach 270 electoral votes in November.
As the Capital Times writes:
When Republicans gathered in St. Paul for their national convention at the start of September, former White House political czar Karl Rove met with the Wisconsin delegation. Rove, who has been repeatedly implicated in a drive by the Bush White House to get U.S. attorneys to take steps to make it harder for minority voters and new voters to cast ballots, counseled the Wisconsin Republicans that they would need to go to extraordinary means to win the battleground state for party presidential nominee John McCain this year.
Just days after returning from the Republican convention, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, a co-chair of the McCain campaign in Wisconsin, took an action that a leading state legislator suggests could "undermine democracy" going into the election about which Rove expressed so much concern.
Van Hollen has sued the state Government Accountability Board, seeking to review -- and potentially disqualify -- the names of as many as 1 million eligible voters whose names appear on the state's poll list.
And in the BRIEF IN SUPPORT OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF WISCONSIN'S
MOTION TO INTERVENE in the case, the text lays out what is happening here as the GOP goes to desperate measures to win the state that they have not captured in a presidential race since 1984:
It was stated at the GAB meeting that approximately 135,000 new voters were registered in 2008. These new voters overwhelmingly associated themselves with the (Democratic Party of Wisconsin) DPW and candidates of the DPW in the Presidential primary election and, the vast majority of these new registrants intend to associate themselves with candidates of the DPW in the election to be held on November 4,2008.
Requiring voters to produce proof of residence as a result of a flawed so-called 'HAVA check' would disenfranchise a significant number of eligible voters, many of whom are members of the DPW, as well as voters who wish to associate themselves with the DPW by voting for DPW candidates.
For more information:
Democratic Party asks to Intervene in Voter Suppression Lawsuit
Democratic Party Briefs
J.B. Van Hollen vs. Government Accountability Board et al
Dane County Case Number 2008CV004085
WI State Journal: State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen should be disqualified from a controversial lawsuit against state election officials because he ignored lawyers' ethics rules, according to a (GAB) filing expected to be made in the case.