A Miller mole within the Justice Dept.?
The state Justice Department's top expert on the Open Records Law, which is at the center of the court action resulting in Judge Maryann Sumi's continuing restraining order against its implementation, is a big supporter of the fleebagging Senate Democrat leader, Mark Miller.
State Rep. Steve Nass today released an e-mail from Assistant Attorney General Thomas Bellavia "that raises serious ethical and legal doubt on the Wisconsin Department of Justice's ability to defend the enactment of the Budget Repair Bill and the Open Meetings Law Case in Dane County."
The opening line of Bellavia's February 27, 2011, e-mail to Senator Erpenbach (D-Middleton) and Senator Mark Miller (D-Madison) reads: "I am a political supporter of your current efforts regarding the budget repair bill."
Rep. Nass sent a letter to Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen requesting an investigation.
What's a little (0.019%) voter fraud?
Losing an election hurts. Losing a close election hurts the most. The Squire of the Stately Manor learned from his father to be magnanimous in victory and gracious in defeat. No one was more gracious, ironically, than Richard Nixon in 1960, despite ample evidence of dead men voting in Mayor Richard Daley's Chicago.
But there will be a recount, which is what happens when 1.5 million people vote and only 204 votes (it was 206 when I wrote my last blog) separate the winner from the loser. That is a margin of 0.013 percent.
I will not cry foul. But if there were 204 votes fraudulently cast, that is an issue.
Consider this: In Dane County, the supreme court race attracted an over-vote of 10,644. That is the shorthand way of saying that, out of 184,098 ballots cast, almost 6 percent voted for no other races. No vote for a highly contested Madison mayor in a highly competitive race. Or county executive. Or mayor of Fitchburg. Or aldermen or school board. Liberals complain when there is an over-vote. May we?
I get this information through the good offices of Vicki McKenna, the crusading advocacy journalist at WIBA 1310 a.m.
It is believed these 10,644 over-votes were generated through absentee ballots circulated during the Siege of the Capitol. How many of them were bonafide Dane County voters is problematic.
Phishing for votes?
The second questionable incident could involve physically phishing for votes. I got this directly from the source but only because I was sitting at one of Vicki's microphones this afternoon, trying to digest Tuesday's election. That's when Peter Friedland of Madison called in to her Up Front program.
"I have seen many things i our neighborhood but what I saw yesterday is one of the few things that kept me awake at night," Mr. Friedland told me in a follow-up interview. "You hear about voter fraud but I never thought about how it was done -- or that it happened here."
Mr. Friedland says that between 5:30 and 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, three women appeared outside the complex of 8 four-unit and 2 eight-unit apartments on Brittany Place, just off Raymond Road in the troubled Prairie Hills neighborhood, just west of Meadowood. Two of the women appeared to be in their 40s, the third was younger. One of them spoke through a bullhorn, the others had camera phones.
One of them brayed through the bullhorn urging lower income residents inside the apartment buildings to vote. "They were saying come and vote and if you weren't going to vote we would like to use your name," Friedland told me. However, no resident heeded their call, from what he could see.
Mr. Friedland later noticed a young man in their company. As residents came outside in response to the bull horning, he entered the buildings. In Mr. Friedland's building, "he appeared to be writing down names on the mailboxes."
Mr. F confronted "the horn lady" who told him to mind his own business. "When I asked what they were doing the two older ladies turned and walked away fast." They jumped into the two waiting automobiles.
A half-hour later he noticed the horn lady outside the Walgreens drug store just north of Allied Drive, asking for voters and/or names. Mr. F identified another of the women at the adjacent McDonald's restaurant with a group of about 20 others.
Could those 20 have used the phished names and addresses they had just harvested in an attempt to vote?
I realize Chris Rickert has a more benign view of the event, but perhaps he did not spend as much time with these people as my informant, inasmuch as the State Journal columnist appears to have been hop-scotching around town.
Loosey goosey voting
Vicki's first guest Wednesday afternoon was John Fund of the Wall Street Journal. "It is a shame and embarrassment to the state of Wisconsin," said the author of the 2008 book "Stealing Elections."
Fund wondered whether the virtual army of out-of-state recall organizers and Capitol protesters had also swelled the ranks of voters. He prescribed three reforms: voter I.D., an end to election-day voter registration, and tightening absentee ballot integrity.
The Wall Street Journal late Wednesday opined that same-day registration "helped Democrat Al Franken narrowly win a Senate seat in 2008. Because identification requirements are scant, the law creates different standards at different polling places and is an invitation to fraud."
These problems were apparent long before Tuesday. In 2008, a 67-page Milwaukee Police Department Report chronicled potential fraud in the state's tally of voters in the 2004 Presidential election. Questionable voting by absentee ballot, voting by felons and disparities between votes cast and those counted were part of "an illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome of the election," the report noted.
Althouse is all over this: Don't talk about fraud! Fraud?! There is no fraud! Pay no attention to those... those... those... frauders!
Here's how you can help Justice Prosser. As John Fund notes, the last statewide recount shifted the margin by 435 votes.
