Update III: Thrown out of court by Judge Maryann Sumi, in October 2008 never to see the inside of a courtroom again.
Update II: For up-to-date developments, see the Election Law at Moritz site, including the GAB's brief for a motion to dismiss.
Update: WisPolitics piece at http://www.wispolitics.com/index.iml?Article=138219.
Contradicting his earlier claims that "(there was no discussion with anybody involved in leadership with the Republican Party (or the McCain campaign) about this (voting rule) lawsuit before it was brought," as Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has said earlier last month, WisPolitics has uncovered new audio (posted at WisPolitics) revealing Van Hollen promising action on alleged "voter fraud" during an address at the Republican National Convention held in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Said Joe Wineke, Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, in a press release. "If J.B. Van Hollen is claiming this lawsuit isn't political, then why did he discuss it with the RPW chair at a partisan political convention and then send signals to fellow Republicans that he was mobilizing the Department of Justice to take action?"
Though Van Hollen's suit is now effectively moot as any proposed judicial remedy would not be achievable just two weeks out from the election when a Dane County judge is expected to rule on the merits, the significance of Van Hollen caught on tape is a smoking gun that the suit is partisan and that Van Hollen lied about it.
Van Hollen has been roundly hit for his filing a legal complaint in light of the imperative of Wisconsin to establish a centralized, computerized voter registration list "coordinated with other agency databases within the State" such as the DOT, as mandated by federal law, specifcally the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which Van Hollen cites in the DOJ Complaint, saying that HAVA requires additional verification of all the voter registrations filed since January 2006.
Van Hollen and the Republican Party contend that the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) has not met its legal obligations to bring Wisconsin into compliance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), though the GAB formulated rules to implement HAVA this year after considering input from the Wisconsin GOP, the Wisconsin Democratic Party and the Obama campaign.
The GOP did not agree with the Board's decision.
The rules are not broad enough for the GOP that needs to suppress votes to have a shot at winning Wisconsin, though its hopes are fading fast, according to recent polls.
The problem for the GOP's proposed rule, rejected by the GAB, is that voters' syncing up with state databases would result in long lines, frustration, and confusion on what is expected to be a historically high turn-out election bringing out 10,000s of casual voters expected to vote largely Democratic, especially in high-density, urban areas.
As reported in the Capital Times: "The audio posted ... on wispolitics.com features Van Hollen telling a group, 'We are going to do our best as the lawyers for the state of Wisconsin, as the defenders and protectors of the law of the state of Wisconsin ... to defend your right to have your vote matter.'"
As reported in Talking Points Memo, in the audio of Van Hollen, he can be heard saying:
"We're out there fighting to make sure that within the context of 'little-L,' liberal voter registration law that we have in the state of Wisconsin, that even though in the context of that law we can't prevent everybody from voting who isn't entitled to vote and preserve the right for everybody who is entitled to vote, to vote, but we are going to do our best, as the lawyers for the state of Wisconsin, as the defenders and protectors of the law of the state of Wisconsin, of the people who are there to defend your right to have your vote matter ... We are out there front and center everyday and you'll be hearing much more from the Department of Justice in the coming months about doing what we can to make sure that those people who have illegally and illegitimately registered to vote, don't have the opportunity on election day to show up and take away your vote by casting one that is not legal."
It was first reported in the Wisconsin State Journal by Mark Pitsch that Reince Priebus, the Wisconsin GOP party chairman, "had multiple conversations with Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen's top aide before Van Hollen filed the lawsuit against the state election agency to compel expanded voter registration checks."
Organized voter fraud has been shown to be a fiction, by the Brennan Center for Justice and a state-federal committee looking into past GOP allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 election.
One of the main targets of the GOP/Van Hollen suppression suit are Milwaukee blacks brought out in record numbers in the February presidential primary.
Van Hollen's proposed rule to suppress the turn-out in the presidential election, would place a burden and slow down many casual black voters who do not happen to have up-to-date driver's licenses.
As Andrew Hacker's piece in a recent New York Review of Books reads:
A Wisconsin survey published in 2005 was more precise (in the GOP effort to prevent Democratically-voting blacks from voting). No fewer than 53 percent of black adults in Milwaukee County were not licensed to drive, compared with 15 percent of white adults in the remainder of the state. According to its author, similar disparities will be found across the nation. [1] [[1] John Pawasarat, The Driver License Status of the Voting Age Population in Wisconsin (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Employment and Training Institute, June 2005), p. 1.]
The NAACP is now a party in the suit along with League of Women Voters, the Democratic Party, teachers, unions, and civil rights groups.
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