Thanks for the explanation on the headline.....
The whole Journal investigation is great, but they have to date been focusing on the flawed registration cards....that situation is a mess, but the real bombshell is that 7,000 more votes were tallied than people who were registered to vote in the City for the November 2nd election.
That's a simple concept that everyone understands and we don't need any BS'ing about the "registration cards" The registration card issue is very important, but should get second billing.
The fascinating thing about this is that not only does this prove the need for Photo ID, but also for dumping the same day registration option.
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?
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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.)