Bob Dohnal is a crusty, longtime Republican and publisher of Wisconsin Conservative Digest. He has also been a pharmacist for years, and his work with customers has him worried about a proposed constitutional amendment requiring voters to have photo identification.
“You get old people going to the pharmacy who don’t drive, don’t have photo I.D.s and won’t realize they need it to vote,” he says. “They aren’t necessarily following the news.”
Dohnal believes his party will be hurt by a photo I.D. requirement. “Anything that reduces turnout hurts Republicans,” he argues.
Dohnal, however, is a voice crying out in a partisan wilderness, where Republicans vehemently support photo I.D. and Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle is adamantly opposed, having just vetoed (for the third time) their proposed bill. Driving the debate has been the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s news coverage and talk radio, which have jointly hammered the idea that widespread fraud must be occurring. One poll showed that 80 percent of state residents now support a photo I.D. requirement.
In their zeal to promote the cause, Republican officials held a press conference at the home of Milwaukeeans Stuart and Gayle Schenk and essentially accused their seminarian son of committing a crime by voting twice. The Schenks denied this. Yet the Journal Sentinel did a front-page -Metro story reporting the GOP accusation of double voting against Schenk.
As it turned out, the claim was false. “The GOP went too far,” the newspaper’s editorial declared, “when it besmirched a man for partisan gain.”
But partisanship is what parties do. The media are supposed to mediate, rather than report an unproven witch hunt. Amid all of this unmediated reporting, the facts are getting lost.
The nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau studied 348,000 voter records across the state and found two individuals “who may have voted twice.” That’s right, two out of 348,000.
The Audit Bureau did not, however, study Milwaukee. Prompted by the firestorm of Journal Sentinel stories roasting the city, Republican appointee U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic and Democrat District Attorney E. Michael McCann launched a joint investigation of election irregularities. To date, they have charged four people with voting twice. That’s four people out of 277,000 city voters in the last presidential election.
Biskupic and McCann also believe that as many as 96 others may have voted twice, but Biskupic concedes that he can’t say this for sure. Some of the 96 registered with the same name and birth date, but it’s quite possible these are different individuals. George Mason University statistics professor Michael McDonald did a check of Ohio and found 9,108 instances where voters had the same first name, last name and birth date.
But let’s assume that all 102 people identified as possible double voters by the Audit Bureau and Milwaukee investigators did commit fraud. And let’s add in the 298 convicted felons identified in these investigations as having illegally voted, though some states do allow felons to vote. How would a photo I.D. requirement prevent this abuse?
Someone who registered at two polling places and showed a photo I.D. at both could still vote twice. Similarly, any felon with such I.D. could vote illegally.
Yes, a photo I.D. requirement might scare away a few of the abusers. Meanwhile, what would it do to legal voters, the people on whom the democratic process depends? In South Dakota, an Associated Press story found, about 25 percent of the voters in poorer counties arrived at the polls without a photo I.D. Translate that percentage to the City of Milwaukee, and more than 69,000 voters would be disenfranchised.
If that sounds extreme, consider a recent study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment and Training Institute, which found that 30 percent of Milwaukee County residents lack a valid driver’s license, including 47 percent of African-American males. Statewide, 23 percent of senior citizens, more than 177,000 people, lack a valid driver’s license or photo I.D. ETI has been researching problems related to driver’s licenses since 1998, and its findings have previously led to legislative reform (unrelated to voting).
These 177,000 senior citizens are the folks Dohnal worries about, who may not realize they need a photo I.D. and will be turned away from the polls. Perhaps this is why the five states that require a photo I.D. also accept other forms of (written) identification at the polls. That might be a reasonable compromise for Wisconsin, but the proposed constitutional amendment won’t allow this.
Ideally, you’d like all voters to pay enough attention to know that they need to get a photo I.D. But are we prepared to use the state constitution to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of such voters in order to marginally improve our chances of nabbing the four indicted double voters and 298 felons we are certain broke the law in the last election?
Both in Milwaukee and statewide, there have been polling place errors in recording addresses and other mistakes. The system could certainly be improved, and the Audit Bureau has suggested reforms. Perhaps everyone, even the most partisan politicians, could calm down and discuss a compromise. But that’s unlikely to happen until the media stop inflaming the issue.
