Posted on 01/25/2005 6:48:24 AM PST by Jean S
A review of Milwaukee voting records from the Nov. 2 presidential election has found more than 1,200 ballots cast from invalid addresses in the city, including many cases in which the voter could not be located at all.
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The number is a result of a detailed computer analysis by the Journal Sentinel of the city’s voter records and represents about 0.4% of the 277,535 ballots cast in the city in the hard-fought election. Some of the problems may be due to flawed record keeping, such as transposed digits or incorrect street names. Many others, however, cannot easily be explained.
The newspaper’s review, the most extensive analysis done so far of the election, revealed 1,242 votes coming from a total of 1,135 invalid addresses. That is, in some cases more than one person is listed as voting from the address. Of the 1,242 voters with invalid addresses, 75% registered on site on election day, according to city records.
While the number is not enough to have determined the outcome of the statewide presidential contest, the revelation prompted renewed criticism Monday by state Republicans and raised concerns at City Hall about how well records were kept on and after a frenzied election day.
Already, the newspaper has reported that about 8,300 more votes were cast than the number of people recorded by the city as voting. This appears to be due to cases where cards from those who presented identification and registered on election day could not be processed, a gap that the city’s own estimates had put at more than 10,000.
In any case, those are not included in the city database and are not part of the paper’s review, which involved checking each voter’s address against two separate lists of properties in the city.
A spot check of addresses that came back as invalid found cases where the address in question is a park, a baseball diamond and at or near the W. Wisconsin Ave. bridge. In most cases, though, there simply was no building at that address.
“I suspect it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Rick Graber, chairman of the state Republican Party. “If there ever was a need for a full-blown, real investigation into what went on, this is enough evidence for it.”
He said the investigation should be done by an outside entity, not a task force such as the one appointed by Mayor Tom Barrett that includes only city employees.
Barrett Chief of Staff Patrick Curley said the newspaper’s findings underscore the need to improve the handling of elections, particularly large-turnout ones that strain the system.
Curley said he believes the problematic addresses - less than 1% of those who voted - are a sign of procedural problems in the Election Commission office, not widespread fraud.
“The process is what we’ve charged the election task force with,” Curley said. “Obviously, improvements are needed.”
Lisa Artison, executive director of the city Election Commission, said simply: “The results you obtained make it clear the new statewide voter system is very badly needed and long overdue.”
But that system, to be online late this year, will do little to safeguard against problems with same-day voter registration, or with the flood of registration cards the city received in the final days before Nov. 2.
While those who register on election day have to present valid identification, it is impossible to check on the spot if the address provided is valid.
Indeed, the city has been unable to process thousands of the registration cards, which officials say are illegible or are lacking required information, such as a birth date. Thus, those voters cannot be sent verification cards, as required under state law.
Artison was to meet Monday with the district attorney’s office to discuss the cards that could not be processed, but the meeting was postponed. Artison said Mike Mahoney, the assistant district attorney in charge of election issues, asked for the meeting.
Under state law, verification cards that are returned as undeliverable must be sent to the local district attorney, though the Journal Sentinel has found spotty compliance statewide. Artison has said “several hundred” of the 73,079 cards that were sent out Jan. 6 have come back. Those have not yet been forwarded to the district attorney.
Questions about the accuracy of the city’s voter rolls, and whether adequate safeguards are in place to prevent fraud, were raised before the Nov. 2 election.
Six days before the election, the state Republican Party challenged 5,619 addresses on the city voter rolls as non-existent, including vacant lots, a billboard and a gyros stand. The challenge, though, was rejected by the city Election Commission, which said the GOP had not met the high legal standard for dropping names from voter rolls.
A review by the city attorney’s office found many cases where the addresses did exist, but could be explained by errors such as numbers from registration cards that were transposed. In other cases, though, officials agreed that addresses on the GOP list didn’t exist.
The city later agreed to have poll workers require identification from anyone attempting to vote from addresses on the GOP list.
At the time, the Republican Party acknowledged that it could not say whether anyone had voted from non-existent addresses in past elections - and since the election, it has made no specific allegations of fraudulent voting in Milwaukee.
Nevertheless, the Journal Sentinel filed an open records request Nov. 8 seeking a computerized list of all registered voters, including a notation of those recorded as having voted Nov. 2. The city provided the information Thursday.
In checking the list for invalid addresses, the newspaper used computer software to compare the addresses of all 269,212 recorded as voting against a U.S. Postal Service list of addresses. That process revealed 31,255 questionable addresses - but that was mainly due to apartment buildings, in which the software read a unit number as an unmatchable address.
Once those were taken out, about 2,900 addresses remained. Each was then entered into the City of Milwaukee’s own database of properties. At that point, about 1,100 non-existent addresses remained.
As an additional step, the newspaper sent reporters to 40 randomly selected suspect addresses. None of them existed.
At that point, reporters tried to match the names of a sample 300 of the listed voters against other public records, to determine if a clerical error was involved.
In about 20% of the cases, it appears as though a clerical error led to the invalid address. For example, one voter’s address was incorrectly listed as 3130 S. 15th St., which does not exist. That person does live at 3130 S. 15th Place, however. In other cases, digits in an address were transposed.
Shirley Dolgner, 73 and a first-time voter in November, was surprised to learn that what she had dutifully printed out on her card on election day was wrong in the city’s system.
Her S. 68th St. address, where she has lived for 20-plus years, went into the voter rolls as S. 63rd St.
“I wrote this myself. Why would this come up like this?” she said. “If this is the system, it’s not working very well.”
But for 80% of the other names in that sample list, no one with the name could immediately be found in other public record searches. That means there are potentially hundreds of cases in which a vote was counted for someone whose existence could not be confirmed, at an address that does not exist.
Graber said that points to the need for election reforms, such as requiring that all voters present photo identification at the polls.
“I think it’s probably premature to judge if it’s incompetence or fraud,” he said. “I think the answers will become clearer as more investigation is done.”
The state GOP filed its own open records request for election information Nov. 16. Graber said the party has not yet received the information it requested.
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle has vetoed the photo identification requirement and says he will do so again. It is opposed by many Democrats, including Barrett, who say it could become an impediment to voting for some.
One safeguard against fraud is the quality of the list of eligible voters, which typically is purged only once every four years - after a presidential contest. Milwaukee is planning to update its list soon, in part to check its accuracy as it becomes part of a new statewide voter list.
Each state must have such a list in place under a federal law passed after the 2000 election. Wisconsin’s is to be completed late this year. It will be set up so that if a voter moves to a new community, that person’s name would automatically be dropped from the previous address.
As it stands now, names can be left on the list for years, leaving the door open for someone to fraudulently vote from the address or to identify himself or herself as someone else and vote. It is impossible to detect that sort of fraud through a computer review such as this one.
"Same problem in Minnesota. Personally, at this point I blame the Republicans for allowing such obvious corruptions to continue. In this confused state, all a RAT voter needs is to have another RAT in a precinct come and swear thaat his/her friend lives in the precinct - no ID needed. RATs set it up and continue to benefit, but Republicans seem to stand by with their thumbs up their @sses."
I absolutely agree! I live in MN but grew up in WI and the same-day registration procedures along with allowing a registered voter to "attest" to another voter's residence in the precinct, is prime juicy target for DemonRATS inherent & apparently natural inclination to commit vote fraud wherever & whenever possible! DemonRAT B#$stards!
When are Repub officials and elected reps ever going to stand up like MEN and WOMEN, and fight the DemonRATS tooth & nail to remove this stupid practice. This is made-for-order fraud potential. In fact I have no doubt that GWB won the presidential election in WI, except for the fact that it was hard to overcome 85,000 same day registrations in Milwaukee alone, many of whom drove up from Illinois or registered & vote twice or more. If Repubs don't have the gumption & fortitude to eliminate these natural fraud practices, then I guess maybe they deserve to lose since they're not willing to stand & fight.
I ought to know, I live in Washington State.
We had just the situattion you describe in 2002. Somebody her, on FR, caught some RAT.org soliciting funds to drag busloads of "student" organizers to come to Minnesota - on the day of the election. The website clearly stated that lodging and food was't what they wanted - only cash donation. So anyway, a slew of us on the Minnesota board sent this to our Reps and so did, I suppose about a zillion others. The doo-doo hit the fan and the story even made the Rad Star if I recall. The upshot was that the RAT.org pulled down its call for funds and put up a 'clarification' of intent. Seems the poor misunderstood RATs were only bent on using these youths to go around getting voters registered on election day. Yeah. Uh huh. That's the stone cold truth.
If this shoddy voter registration crap is not eliminated or, at the least, a serious attempt being made to reverse it, then the Republicans will richly deserve the losses they suffer. Unfortunately, they still seem to need somebody to supply some spine.
Vote fraud index ping!
"opposed by many Democrats, including Barrett, who say it could become an impediment to voting for some."
So showing a picture ID is now an impediment to voting...An ID was an impediment to me underage drinkin' but I don't see anyone stopping that practice. What are they so afraid of? (Sarcasm Light is now ON!)
Sellf ping
I fear that as long as R's propose election fraud reform and D's oppose it, there will be an effective stalemate, especially in strongly D blocks like Seattle. I fear that the only way to get real election reform is to start cheating like the Dems do. Do we want election reform? Have some rural strongly Republican county in upstate NY generate 8 million R ballots, offsetting NYC and throwing NY into the R column. That happens, and I guarantee we will get some real reforms.
I don't see why ANYONE is against a national ID system. Technically all we would be doing is bringing the DOT into the 21 centrary and inter-connecting all the indivual state driver licenses into one.
Thats really all we're talking about.
I was reading the Sentinel this morning and noticed that "Nov. Election" button in the sidebar. I clicked on it and found an interesting article from Thursday, Nov. 4th
---two days after the election.
State workers helped in race to add voters to city rolls
I'll summarize it.
On the afternoon before the election, Gov. Doyle says he "learned of the large quantity of voter registration forms still waiting to be processed" in Milwaukee. Mayor Barrett was rounding up volunteers to help. Barrett and Doyle were co-chairs of Kerry's campaign. On Monday Barrett aparently had told the Sentinel that "more than 1,000 registrations" were involved. Ultimately [meaning Thursday?], he "put the figure at 15,000 or 20,000". [They were changing their stories way back then!]
Lisa Artison had no clue how many registrations there were "because they weren't counted". "We don't count them on a day-to-day basis," she said. "Certainly Monday night wasn't the night to count them." [Why not?!] Artison was appointed as elections supervisor last summer after working on the mayor's campaign.
WHAT DID THESE VOLUNTEERS DO?
"Stacks of the unrecorded registrations were divvied up and taken to several city offices, where the volunteers borrowed city computers to use a Web site to determine which ward the new voters should be assigned to". Cards were then divided into stacks by ward to be sent to the polling stations. Artison said she wasn't sure how late the operation went. She went home at 1:30 or 2 a.m. while the volunteers were still at it. The governor's admin secretary, said the state volunteers who helped "were up all night" processing the registrations. The article doesn't mention whether any regular election office workers stayed that night.
WHO WERE THESE VOLUNTEERS?
1) "...about a dozen state employees, some based in Madison and others in Milwaukee...". They were "volunteers and were on their own time".
2) Mayor Barrett worked on the registrations that night. So did his sister and his nephew. And some of his "friends".
3) And "...members of the local painters union..."!
4) I guess we can assume that Republicans were not asked to provide volunteers.
WHAT's WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
Here we had an elections supervisor allowing unsupervised politically-connected volunteers to have access to the voter data base THE NIGHT BEFORE THE ELECTION. She even left at 2am and let them continue working. She had no idea how many cards there were to begin with. So there would be no way for her to know if someone "ultimately" added cards to the stack. And we don't even know what part of the system these people had access to....could they tamper with VOTES, not just voters?
WERE THERE ACTUALLY 85,000 SAME DAY REGISTRANTS?
Did that amazingly high number of new registrants really show up on election day? How do we know they weren't "manufactured" in the bowels of city hall the night before?
=================================
This needs to be brought to the attention of the new federal task force. I've sent it to a couple of bloggers. The FBI needs to look closely at time stamps on everything that was put in the system that night. And they need to look at those 15-20,000 cards to see if they have recurring handwriting on them. I've always thought that high number of same-day registrants was suspicious. I'm beginning to wonder now whether many of them ever existed at all.
If nothing else Artison should be fired immediately. At BEST she supposedly allowed up to 20,000 registrations to pile up and go unrecorded. At WORST she gave partisans unsupervised access to official voter records on the eve of a very closely contested election...and she didn't even stay to watch what was going on!
(I'm cross-posting this on the other thread, so some of you may get multiple pings.)
Ping for the Washington state crowd.
See number 110 above. Very interesting.
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Invalid Addresses
Kane: