What’s Worse Than Turning a Blind Eye?
Wisconsin voters have learned over the past two years that Wisconsin elections cannot be verified due to serious flaws in the system. The more they learn about the opportunities for fraud in our elections, the more obvious it becomes that we cannot trust that the results reported for any election truly reflect the will of the people until the problems are corrected. The unexplainable, but strong, resistance of lawmakers to correcting the problems and the near absence of any serious investigative journalism are only deepening the resolve of Wisconsin voters to demand a fix.
Last week, Vicki McKenna, one of the self-proclaimed conservative radio talk show hosts, invited Christian Adams, President and General Counsel of the Public Interest Leadership Foundation (PILF), to discuss election integrity on her show. Adams worked in the Department of Justice (DOJ) voting section from 2005 – 2010 and President Trump appointed him to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and a Commissioner to the US Commission on Civil Rights, a position he still holds. The PILF is a public interest law firm dedicated to election integrity.
McKenna teased Adams’ appearance on her show by saying Harmeet Dillion, head of the DOJ Civil Rights Division, has uncovered “hundreds of thousands of dead voters” on the voter rolls in states across the country. She also called out the Wisconsin Elections Commission for being non-compliant with a DOJ request to share the Wisconsin Registered Voter List and a Waukesha County judge’s order to verify the citizenship of the names on the list in time for the spring election.
I listened intently to the entire program hoping McKenna was going to seriously address the Wisconsin election system. When it came time to interview Adams, the conversation focused on the work Adams’ organization is doing around the country on election integrity and some of the obstacles being encountered, but it did nothing to enhance listeners’ understanding of why Wisconsin elections are unverifiable or motivate them in the fight to get this addressed. The segment fell so short of what Wisconsin voters need to know that I thought I might have missed something in the live program. I pulled up the archived program, which is available online, and relistened to it in its entirety. The descriptor of the posting listed the interview with Christian Adams as part of the online content, but the interview had been deleted. It is impossible to know if this was by design or someone’s error but I was unable to re-evaluate whether the much-hyped segment was as meaningless as it seemed to me in focusing what matters most in Wisconsin.
While McKenna talks about the importance of election integrity in vague terms, the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) maintains the Badger Voters Website that lists a total registered voter count of 8,276,284. There are about 5.9 million people residing in Wisconsin, with the adult population 18 or older estimated at 4.2 – 4.3 million. Of the adult population, a subset is eligible to vote. The more than 4 million names of ineligible voters the WEC insists on maintaining on the Registered Voter List is a vast reservoir that can be used by sophisticated hackers in the generation and casting of fraudulent ballots. Cybercrime has become the weapon of choice for many who steal things of value. Nothing would be more valuable to steal than an election. Verifiability means every vote cast can be tied to the name of a currently eligible voter when questions about election results arise, and can only be achieved when the Registered Voter List is strictly limited to the names of currently eligible voters.
Vicki McKenna knows that ineligible voter names on the Wisconsin Registered Voter List are at the heart of the unverifiability of our elections; yet she doesn’t use the power of her microphone to educate voters or pressure the WEC and the Legislators to correct the situation. No member of the WEC or Wisconsin Legislator has ever denied that there are millions of ineligible voter names on the Registered Voter List, nor has anyone offered a defense of why the list should not be purged of all but the currently eligible voters. There isn’t one.
Serious investigative reporting about the Wisconsin election system flaws is rare and many reporters actively work to suppress legitimate concerns with demeaning labels such as “election deniers”. Molly Beck reports for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She typifies the liberal media and is a classic example of why the publication’s daily circulation (paper and digital) has fallen to less than 40,000 over the past decade. She is an embarrassment to the ideal of journalistic integrity with a strong liberal bias skewing everything she writes. In a recent article about how Michael Gableman, the attorney Assembly Speaker Robin Vos hired to investigate irregularities in the 2020 election, is fighting to keep his law license, Beck closed with “Biden beat Trump in 2020 by nearly 21,000 votes out of 3.3 million or 0.6 percentage points. Recounts and state and federal courts confirmed his victory”. Her willful ignorance is glaring in the suggestion that recounts and court rulings are proof that the election result should be believed. The lens she views her work through is so clouded with her liberal ideology it keeps her from following the truth where it leads. If she approached her work with integrity, she would know that elections cannot be trusted to reflect the will of the people until every vote can be tied to the name of a currently eligible voter…and she would fight for it.
Last April, Wisconsin voters spoke clearly about the importance of verifiable elections when they passed a binding referendum to amend the state Constitution to require photo ID in every election. 61% voted for it. Wisconsin has a straightforward process for amending the Constitution that requires a proposal to amend to be passed through both Legislative Houses in two consecutive sessions, and then ratified by the majority of the voters in a statewide election. This process has been successfully used 145 times since our Constitution was adopted in 1848 and we may be forced to use it again if other means fail. Republicans are going to be fighting hard to maintain their majorities in both Houses next year as Wisconsin’s redistricting plays itself out. It may be the right time for Wisconsin voters to make it clear to candidates who want our votes that we expect them to run on the commitment to clean up the Registered Voter List, through Constitutional amendment if necessary.
Last week the Department of Justice sued the WEC for refusing to turn over the unredacted list of Wisconsin registered voters. Will this make Wisconsin Legislators realize the issue is not going away and serve as the much-needed catalyst to light a fire under them?
The WEC and most Legislators arrogantly ignore voter demands to clean up the voter rolls. Most self-described conservatives with microphones that should be used to educate voters and pressure the WEC and Legislators to act, maintain “radio silence”. We can only speculate as to why. In the matter of election integrity, is there anything worse than turning a blind eye to the unverifiability of Wisconsin’s elections? Yes. Trying to create the illusion of being engaged in the fight with meaningless distractions that do nothing to arm the voters with the information they need and don’t take us one step closer to verifiability.