Our Progressive Tradition Demands Election Reform
Wisconsin, long thought of as the state with a Progressive tradition of reforms, has seriously slipped when it comes to election reform.
Our democracy is built upon faith that a vote has value and that it not be negated through cheating. When that faith is shaken, we must face the issue openly and clean up the system.
Let us not forget our own historical evolution in democracy and the voting rights we have today. It took time for democracy to root itself in this country, and to evolve. There were hard-fought battles along the way.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the expansion of voting rights brought a new focus of public policy debate and reform. The issue had become: Whose votes would actually count?
The Populist movement had its first convention in 1892. They called for the establishment of the initiative, the referendum and the direct election of senators by voters rather than by state legislatures.
Populists gave way to the Progressives, who brought greater organization and leadership to the reform movement. The Progressive Party moved to eliminate the caucus system of candidate selection and to replace it with direct primary voting by the public.
One of the nationally recognized leaders of the Progressives came out of Wisconsin – Robert La Follette, who was elected Wisconsin’s governor and then one of its U.S. senators. Thus, it is with great irony that today the state of Wisconsin has documented election fraud in one of the closest presidential margins in the country.
A series of investigative articles in this newspaper helped expose and explain the vulnerabilities of Wisconsin’s ballot process in Milwaukee.
Headlines were clear, “Over 1,200 voters’ addresses found invalid.” The newspaper also found that “at least 186 people voted from invalid addresses that officials had been warned about before the election.” It also reported that “perhaps as many as 7,000 more votes were cast citywide than the number of people recorded as voting.”
But the problem is not limited to Milwaukee. Several people have been indicted in Racine County in illegal voter registration scams. In one, a group called Project Vote provided an incentive for falsification by paying people for each person they registered. In another, an illegal alien was hired and registered other illegal aliens.
In counties throughout the state, people were certified by local clerks as “deputy registrars” to register new voters as part of a massive statewide voter drive. On the surface, this may appear to be an exercise in democracy.
However, if a new voter is registered by a deputy registrar, their “identification” is presumed on election day. The result was that some people could not be asked for identification when they came to the polls, even though it was known in advance that some of these deputy registrars were felons or illegal aliens or were paid for each person they registered.
Many people went to the polls in 2004 in Wisconsin expecting to be able to vote, only to find that their names already had been crossed off.
We’ll never know why, because it is illegal to ask for identification at the polls in the Dairy State.
We must tighten the present laws that exist. Those that break the law must be prosecuted to the fullest extent.
Those who oppose reform argue that these improved laws will disenfranchise voters. This is disingenuous. On the contrary, failure to enact meaningful reform to identify and properly enfranchise those who are truly eligible to vote diminishes the value of an honest vote.
The key to keeping the vote honest in the 21st century is found in that modern innovation, the photo identification card. Without a requirement for use of a photo ID in voting, our ballot process is at the mercy of those who would abuse our system for their own ends.
Opponents argue that voter identification depresses voter turnout. Yet in Virginia, a state that uses voter photo identification, there was a record voter turnout in 2004. The same can be said for Florida’s Miami-Dade County, which also now uses voter photo identification.
An argument is also advanced that it is too difficult for people to obtain photo identification. However, this has not been a problem in less developed countries such as Iraq which, in its recent elections, had a voter turnout that approached that of the recent U.S. presidential election (58% and 60%, respectively).
We require photo identification to drive, to attend school, to rent a video, to cash a check, to get a library card. It is not too much to require the same to vote.
Other reform steps should be enacted to create clean voter lists, guarantee valid voter addresses, prevent felons from voting and establish tougher penalties for buying votes.
It is time to continue the progressive tradition. For those states too obstinate to guarantee fraud-free elections, the U.S. Congress must get involved, just as it did with the Voting Rights Act and, more recently, the Help America Voter Act.
We cannot go through another election with major voting discrepancies. If states are unwilling to reform, federal investigative action must be forthcoming. To those who would deny it, we need only point out the need for such federal help in the 1960s in the American South.
There is no shame in needing to continue such reforms – but there is dishonor and danger in pretending that the need does not exist.
Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott McCallum is a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute in Seattle and president and chief executive officer of Aidmatrix in Dallas. He resides in Wisconsin.