Van Hollen's Hail Mary

Yesterday, Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen decided to file a last-minute suit against the state's elections agency in an effort to get them to force ineligible voters off the rolls. Seems straight-forward enough, right?

Yeah, maybe not.

I have several questions about this move that I'd love to see addressed: first, how many states actually have full compliance with the HAVA law? And what does full compliance mean for voter enfranchisement (let's talk about paperless ballots, shall we)? How long would it take for Wisconsin to conduct this back check of registrations, and would it interfere with the upcoming November elections (something tells me it might)? Are we setting ourselves up to be the next Ohio or Florida because of this?

One of the latest causes du jour of the GOP has been voter ID and fraud, and this move only seems to play into their push. Thing is, voter fraud has been shown, time and time again, not to be at all systemic or very problematic. In fact, the vast majority of inconsistencies found in voter rolls by the state board all seem to be minor instances of typos, variations in how names are used, and incompatibilities between state databases. Certainly, it's worth working to streamline and better the registration system so that it's easier to conduct the necessary checks. In fact, since August of this year, we've apparently achieved that ability as required under the law (more importantly, we should work to ensure that everyone who can vote is able to do so without difficulty).

But since this was later than the deadline laid out by HAVA, and since that meant some time wherein new registrations were not run through the more strict background checks, Van Hollen is irritated enough to sue.

The state's election officials are not pleased, and rightfully so, I think. Coming just two months before the presidential elections--likely to be hotly contested in this state--the suit smells a bit like a last-minute hail Mary, something that might help skew results one way or another. Maybe I'm being overly paranoid, but being that all evidence suggests little real voter fraud in Wisconsin, and being that the elections board did eventually come into compliance with the law, the move seems unnecessary.

At best, it will eliminate a small handful of dodgy registrations. At worst, it might disenfranchise a whole slew of perfectly valid voters. In theory, that's what HAVA was supposed to fix, not contribute to.

But hey, at least we're not Michigan. I hope.

UPDATED TO ADD: Well, turns out Van Hollen is the Wisconsin co-chair of John McCain's campaign. No, that doesn't smack of being a conflict of interest at all.

I'd also like to note that using mismatched address data from WisDOT and voter registrations as reason to bar people from voting is an especially terrible idea when you consider how many people move to new apartments from year to year (students and lower income folks especially). I have some personal experience with this: when you move that often, it's sometimes difficult to remember to update everything, in a timely fashion, with WisDOT. That alone should never lead to someone being prevented from voting, though.