Published: November 04, 2006 11:51 pm         

Stephanie Salter: Taking a closer look

Republicans used the 2004 presidential election in Wisconsin as a poster child for mandatory photo IDs, complaining that widespread voter fraud was behind John Kerry’s 11,000- vote win.

In an August 2005 news conference, GOP officials said their research revealed nine people who’d voted in Milwaukee and again in Chicago, Minneapolis or Madison. The allegations made it to the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, which reported “more than 200 cases of felons voting illegally and more than 100 people who voted twice, used fake names or false addresses or voted in the name of a dead person. Moreover, there were 4,500 more votes cast than voters listed.”

Former GOP congresswoman Susan Molinari, a commissioner, concluded that mandatory photo IDs were necessary because “a joint report” by a task force of federal and local law enforcement and election officials had proved that “illegal votes” had swung Wisconsin’s election.

George Washington University law professor Spencer Overton dug into the “facts.”

Those nine cases in which people voted twice? The U.S. Attorney (appointed by Republicans) determined that none involved fraud. Six were the result of clerical errors; the others involved people with similar names but different birth dates.

Those felons who voted? A photo ID wouldn’t stop them.

The pool from which the joint task force investigators extracted their supposedly grim conclusions? It focused on 70,000 Milwaukee votes cast by people who had registered and voted on Election Day, an uncommon option unavailable in 44 states but allowed in Wisconsin.

The 4,500 more votes than voters listed? More than explainable with 70,000 new Election Day registrations. And even among those 70,000, the task force found only about 100 that may have involved double voting, fake addresses or names.

“Assuming that each of these instances resulted from intentional voter fraud rather than a clerical mistake or other explanation,” Overton writes, “this is a fraud rate of less than one-seventh of one percent … or one in 700.” Likely, that rate is even lower. Only four cases of fraud had emerged by December 2005; one was dismissed, another ended in acquittal, another in a hung jury.

“Contrary to the claims of Carter-Baker Commissioner Molinari,” Overton writes, “the law enforcement task force did not find that the Wisconsin election was ‘decided by illegal votes.’ Even in the improbable event that all 100 alleged fraudulent votes and 200 improper felon votes were cast for John Kerry, Kerry’s lead in the state would be reduced from 11,000 to 10,700 … The U.S. Attorney explicity stated: ‘We don’t see a massive conspiracy to alter the election in Milwaukee, one way or another.’”