The mission of the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition is to restore public ownership and oversight of elections, and to ensure the fundamental right of every American citizen to vote and to have each vote counted as intended in a secure, transparent, impartial, and independently verified election process.
OPINION: Time to end voter fraud witch hunt
Submitted by Deb on Sun, 04/29/2007 - 5:46pm
by Bill Wineke
Wisconsin State Journal
April 15, 2007
There is some truly comforting news in the latest audit of elections in Wisconsin: Voter fraud here seems virtually nonexistent.
The state Elections Board reported late last week that as many as 82 felons may have voted in the 2006 election. Given that 2.16 million state residents voted, that amounts to a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of 1 percent.
It even amounts to a fraction - two- tenths of 1 percent - of the 41,500 felons who are being supervised in the state.
The issue of felons voting has been a big political football. Republicans have raised the specter of voter fraud repeatedly, using it as a club to try to change the laws to require that voters have a photo identification card.
One state resident, Kimberly Prude of Milwaukee, has been in jail for more than a year after being convicted of voting while on probation, an infraction Prude attributes to confusion. She says she thought she could vote so long as she wasn't in prison.
She's in prison now because her conviction on the voting fraud charge ended her probation.
U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic and his staff looked at hundreds of potential violations based on 2004 voting records and eventually charged 14 Milwaukee area residents with violations, people The New York Times described last week as "mostly black, poor Democratic and first-time voters." Of these, five were convicted.
Prosecution of voter fraud has been a Justice Department priority in the Bush administration. U.S. attorneys who weren't sufficiently zealous in this area lost their jobs.
Biskupic has been zealous. That doesn't mean he's done anything wrong. Carrying out the priorities of the Justice Department is one of his duties.
But the fact is that no one has found enough evidence of wrongdoing to make that priority worth the effort. Voting fraud has not had a serious effect on state elections.
It's really time to end the witch hunt for crooked voters, since all it does is intimidate voters and undermine public confidence in the electoral system. Did Wisconsin really gain anything by putting a woman in jail at taxpayer expense for more than a year because she misunderstood her parole rules?
And do we honestly think there are large numbers of convicted felons out there who are plotting secret ways to cast their ballots?
What the audit shows is Wisconsin voters are honest and trustworthy.
We should rejoice in that. It's good news. Frankly, the results of the audit show us to be a far more law-abiding people than I would have suspected.
Our real problem as a society is not that too many people who shouldn't vote do, but that too many people who should vote don't.
The lack of participation in the voting process is a major concern in a society that operates on the assumption that rulers rule with the consent of the governed.
So for the sake of the governing process, perhaps we in the Badger State ought to just give ourselves a pat on the back for being honest voters and encourage our prosecutors to go look for some more promising areas of skullduggery.
VIDEO: “Protecting Your Vote”
