Accountability

I'm still hearing from people who continue to receive faulty absentee ballots from the McCain campaign, and now, in addition to just checking to see whether the information on them is correct and reporting problems to the city clerk, there's another course of action we can take.

One Wisconsin Now has created a petition "to the newly-created Election Task Force and the Government Accountability Board...calling for an immediate investigation of the mailing." There's also a tool to report bad ballots for those who've already gotten them. Both can be found here. Go! Report! Sign!

Oh but the voting shenanigans don't stop there. J.B. Van Hollen still insists that his last-minute lawsuit against the GAB is totally nonpartisan, but for some reason, keeps changing the story about whether or not he or anyone in his department spoke with Republican party members prior to filing.

Here's a handy timeline of events and statements, courtesy of the (admittedly partisan) Democratic Party of Wisconsin:

September 10, 2008

Van Hollen filed suit against the Government Accountability Board, stating “The goal of this requirement is to protect the integrity of elections by ensuring that only those who are qualified and properly registered would be permitted to cast ballots.” (Source: AG Van Hollen release, 9.10.08)

September 17, 2008

During an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, Van Hollen said, “I can’t imagine what’s partisan about asking for fair elections … this should be about as nonpartisan an issue as there is. … Once again, I don’t know who is making this a partisan issue. Our decision to sue is non-partisan as well. (Source, WPR, Joy Cardin, 9.18.08)

During an interview with the Appleton-Post Crescent, Kevin St. John said the only motive fueling the complaint less than two months before the election is compliance with rules. (Source, APC 9.18.08)

September 18, 2008

Following a court hearing, St. John wouldn't confirm or deny whether Van Hollen consulted with the Republican Party or McCain's camp before launching the lawsuit. When pressed by reporters he responded by saying Van Hollen doesn't use any consultation with any party as a basis to decide whether to sue. (Source: AP, 9.18.08)

"This is not a coordinated lawsuit. I can say that absolutely," St. John added. (Source: WSJ, 9.18.08)

Later in the day Van Hollen said "There was no discussion with anybody involved in leadership with the Republican Party (or the McCain campaign) about this lawsuit before it was brought."

Van Hollen said he did not believe any of his aides discussed the matter with the party or campaign either. "I can't say for certain what they have or haven't done with every minute of their day any more than they could speak about mine, but I have no reason to believe - none of them have reported to me - that anybody involved in the Republican Party or the McCain campaign about this lawsuit," Van Hollen said. (Source: MJS 9.18.08)

Van Hollen's attorneys defended his lawsuit as legal and appropriate, with no conflict of interest or consultation with any Republican Party official. (Source: WISC-TV, 9.18.08)

Later in the day, a GOP attorney said he complained to the state Department of Justice about two weeks before Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen sued the state's elections authority, but Van Hollen said he was unaware of that contact. He also said he had “no reason to believe” any of his aides discussed the case with the GOP or the McCain campaign.

Finally, St. John admitted, “at least one person” at the department had contact with someone from the party on the matter. (Source: MJS 9.18.08)

September 19, 2008

Contradicting earlier statements made by DOJ staff, news reports revealed that the lead Department of Justice attorney for Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s lawsuit against the state’s election authority met with Republican Party representatives about a week before filing the suit.

Justice attorney Steven Means said he met with Republican attorneys Chris Mohrman and Jim Troupis at their request to discuss the Government Accountability Board’s policy on checking voter information. Other Republicans participated in the meeting via conference call, but Means said he could not recall who they were. (MJS, 9.19.08)

“The elections board is violating the law, so of course we went to the attorney general,” Mohrman said. “There may have been multiple contacts, different people to different people.” (MJS, 9.19.08)

September 21, 2008

In an interview with the Green Bay Press Gazette, Van Hollen said, “Anything I do anything related to a campaign, that's on our own time and it's on our own dime.”

“Once again, we're just flat out enforcing the law,” Van Hollen added. “Whether that hurts McCain or helps McCain, I frankly don't know. The reality is the law says that we do this to make elections fairer, and no matter whom I support, I'm enforcing the law, so I don't see what the McCain campaign has to do with it at all, frankly. (Source: GBPG, 9.21.08)

September 23, 2008

RPW Chair, Reince Preibus, admitted to the Wisconsin State Journal that he discussed his frustration with the Government Accountability Board’s decision to not commence the voter checks demanded by the RPW several times at the Republican National Convention, including at a delegation breakfast attended by Van Hollen and in a small group setting also attended by Van Hollen.

Preibus also admitted that he had multiple contacts with Van Hollen’s top aide, Deputy Attorney General Ray Taffora, regarding his belief that the Government Accountability Board should expand voter registration checks before Van Hollen filed the Lawsuit. (Source: WSJ, 9.23.08)

So, not exactly a smoking gun, but certainly more than enough to raise some serious alarms. Who talked to who and when? Is that at all common in a case like this (and if so, should it be)? As more and more interested parties pile onto the lawsuit and new details about the case emerge practically every day, I can't help but wonder: who's policing our top cop?

h/t Whalla!

Disenfranchising voters with J.B. Van Hollen

Van Hollen sure has started himself a good old-fashioned shit storm, hasn't he? Not that the issue of alleged voter fraud and disenfranchisement hasn't been around since time immemorium, but recently it's blown up here in Wisconsin thanks to several strange incidents involving misleading absentee ballot mailers sent by the McCain campaign and our AG's last-minute lawsuit.

Now the Democratic Party of Wisconsin wants in on the action, filing to be added as a party to Van Hollen's voter registration suit. Their goal, according to State Democratic Party Chairman Joe Wineke, is either to pressure Van Hollen into recusing himself from the suit or, failing that, to represent the estimated 1 million Wisconsin voters who might be wrongly purged from the voter rolls if it goes through.

All this, and Common Cause just put out a report that casts Wisconsin's voting process in glowing terms--best in the nation, even. Van Hollen and the McCain campaign seem hell-bent on making that report as irrelevent as possible, as quickly as possible.

I came to Wisconsin as a student, and the same-day, motor-voter registration was a huge boon to me and my fellow classmates. Most of us moved to a new apartment or dorm every year, making it difficult to keep our DOT records up-to-date at all times. And since many of us were coming from out-of-state, it was especially nice to be able to cast our votes from here, and not through the often difficult and unpredictable process of absentee voting.

I had this fact hammered home just recently when, at the behest of Lee Rayburn, I headed over to vpi.wi.gov to look up my own voter registration status and discovered that there was no record of me having voted in the 2004 presidential elections. That's curious, because I did vote that year, and by absentee ballot, having been told that I could cast my vote early by doing so and thus avoid long lines at the polls. Turns out, it was likely never counted.

I've heard in the past that absentee and provisional ballots are sometimes not counted until well after election day, and then only if the results are very close. This strikes me as incredibly stupid--all legitimate votes cast should be counted! But not only that, the election for which my vote was apparently not counted was damn close in Wisconsin, where Kerry won by a razor-thin margin. So what gives? And how can you expect me to trust that absentee ballots, especially those with incorrect city clerk information on them a la the McCain campaign, will be counted at all?

That's why Wisconsin's current voter registration methods are so important--and why, as Common Cause's report points out--they work so well. Less hassle at the polls means shorter lines, and fewer people turning away in frustration or for lack of time. And, despite mostly Republican claims to the contrary, there has been very little evidence of wide-spread voter fraud. Where it does crop up, it's in very small numbers and gets dealt with quickly and appropriately. Certainly, we should be sure that there are no dead people registered, no felons, and no duplicate applications. This is a worthwhile effort. But we need to balance that rather carefully with the need to make sure that everyone who is eligible and wants to vote can do so without impediment.

For another good, insightful and well-researched take on why Van Hollen's move is dangerous and ridiculous, please read Bruce Murphy's piece over at Milwaukee Magazine. Here's a choice excerpt:

It was the Republican Party, not Van Hollen, that originally demanded the Government Accountability Board take action to bar all these voters. The GAB is nonpartisan and run by six retired judges. The six judges were selected from a list by Gov. Jim Doyle, with three appointments getting approved by the Republican-led state Assembly and three getting approved by the Democratic-led state Senate. Its members, and its legal counsel George Dunst, did not believe the federal law required the action demanded by the Republican Party.

The GAB went further than consult the law, however. It solicited testimony from the experts on local polling places, the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association and the Wisconsin County Clerks Association. Representatives of both groups predicted the Republican Party’s proposal could not be accomplished in the 10 weeks remaining until the election and would “create havoc” at the polls (and we're now down to seven weeks). Bushey says she checked with her membership in the state’s 72 counties and the members were “overwhelmingly” opposed to the GOP idea. Nancy Zastrow, head of the Municipal Clerks Association, said the feeling was the same among her 1,300 fellow clerks.

Only after the Republican Party’s demand was shot down did Van Hollen go into action.

Frankly, I don't see how you wouldn't view this as a boldly partisan move on Van Hollen's part. So while there is room for improvement in how we register and verify voters in this state (not to mention nationwide, where people mostly seem to have a tougher time of it than those of us in Wisconsin), this particular effort only seems aimed at making the situation worse. And with so much riding on this next election, we simply cannot afford to let bad partisan politics take control of our voting system.

Maybe Van Hollen doesn't want to be AG anymore

I'm confused. Isn't the state Attorney General supposed to defend the state against lawsuits challenging state laws? Or are AGs allowed to pick and choose which laws they'd like to defend at any given time?

JB Van Hollen, Wisconsin's current AG, has just announced that he will not defend the state in a lawsuit filed by Wisconsin Family Action challenging the same-sex domestic partnership registry that was passed as part of this year's budget and went into effect on August 3.

This is interesting simply because of all the speculation over Van Hollen's ability to put his presumably non-partisan job over his politics (he's a registered Republican) that first arose when he initially ran for the office. The allegations again surfaced when he was pushing for what could have been massively disruptive voter registration checks during the fall elections.

It gets especially fascinating when taken alongside the federal Department of Justice's decision to defend DOMA against a lawsuit brought by a gay couple that wishes to be married. Though the DoJ has since issued a memo stating that they, along with the Obama Administration, believe DOMA to be discriminatory and in need of repeal, but that they're still obligated "to defend federal statutes when they are challenged in court. The Justice Department cannot pick and choose which federal laws it will defend based on any one administration's policy preferences."

(Of course, the fact that the DoJ has, historically, done just such picking and choosing seems to fly right over their heads here, but technically they're still correct that they're supposed to defend all federal laws--if they are looking to see it eventually overturned, though, they'll need to start using less inflammatory language in their legal briefs)

I'm of the personal opinion that defense of such blatantly discriminatory laws is not warranted, and that our national charter of equality for all should always trump deeply flawed legislation. But I can also understand if, legally, the DoJ is supposed to defend them all regardless.

So then I'm particularly impressed at Van Hollen's apparent dismissal of his own job description. He was elected by the people of Wisconsin to uphold the state's laws, no? Of course, his public argument seeks to get around all that:

"My decision isn’t based on a policy disagreement," he said. " As Attorney General, I prosecute and defend laws that I wouldn’t have voted for if I were a policymaker. That is what I believe the job entails.

"But I will not ignore the Constitution. My oath isn’t to the legislature or the governor. My duty is to the people of the State of Wisconsin and the highest expression of their will -- the Constitution of the State of Wisconsin. When the people have spoken by amending our Constitution, I will abide by their command. When policymakers have ignored their words, I will not."

What if the amendment is illegal, though? There's also a lawsuit currently pending that challenges the legality of the law because it allegedly violates the rule that you can't have a single vote for two or more issues. Wisconsin's marriage amendment does, in fact, appear to violate that rule by including the ban on gay marriage as well as a ban on "anything substantially similar" to marriage.

Staunch amendment backers like Julaine Appling of WFA were careful to vehemently deny that the law would effect things like domestic partnerships, but that's exactly what they're now trying to do. And it looks like Van Hollen is on their side.

All of this hubbub could make for a great case when the lawsuit challenging the legality of the amendment goes to court. Clearly, it was talking about more than one thing, otherwise Van Hollen and WFA wouldn't be up in arms about the domestic partnership registry (which, it's important to remember, only affords 40 of the 200 rights married heterosexual couples get).

I still have to wonder, though - can we recall Van Hollen for dereliction of duty while we're at it?

JB Van Hollen has a good sense of humor

In a letter to Senate Democrats, who were curious as to how much taxpayer money was being spent on his "frivolous" lawsuit against the Government Accountability Board, Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen claimed that, "At the time of your letter, the Department of Justice had spent the court filing fee: $155."

It's possible that, at the time the letter arrived in his hands, the only pay out that had been made was the filing fee. What he's leaving out, perhaps out of spite, is how much it has cost to pay DoJ employees to work on the case:

[Rep. Mark] Pocan said Van Hollen omitted the cost of having Department of Justice employees work long hours on the complicated lawsuit since its filing six weeks ago.

“He’s had his spokesman on the issue. He’s had lawyers on the issue — and they wrote a 78-page brief,” Pocan said. “It’s pretty clear he’s not telling us how much taxpayer money he’s wasting on this lawsuit.”

Maybe it's all just an elaborate practical joke Van Hollen is pulling. I mean, claiming that a suit of any size only costs $155 is pretty laughable. Unless he's doing this pro bono, out of the goodness of his own heart.

Excuse me, I'm laughing again....OK, all better.

Let's hope that the judge hearing the case tomorrow takes things a little more seriously, and gives Van Hollen a good, proper rebuking.

Van Hollen: Open carry yes, just don't bark or brandish

There has long been debate in the state of Wisconsin over the legality of openly carrying a firearm. Our Supreme Court has already ruled on the matter of concealed carry, and determined that the current ban does not violate the state constitution. But in cases wherein a person who was openly carrying a legally registered gun was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, things have been a little murky.

So it was perhaps understandable that Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen would issue a memorandum addressing this very issue, in the hopes of clearing up some of that legal gray area.

Only, I can't quite tell if he actually managed to do that. You can read the memo here (.pdf). The gist of the note is that Van Hollen asserts the legality of open carry in the state--which we already knew. In trying to decide whether the act of open carry constitutes "disorderly conduct" or not, however, he wanders around a bit before essentially deciding that "it depends."

Which is, y'know, fair enough and all, but wasn't the point of the memo supposed to be to lay out some more solid guidelines?

The illustrious Illusory Tenant lays it out nicely for us:

Van Hollen continues:

The same concepts should apply to handguns. The state constitutional right to bear arms extends to openly carrying a handgun for lawful purposes. . . . If, however, a person brandishes a handgun in public, the conduct may lose its constitutional protection.

Now I'm lost. Perhaps the concept has remained the same, but the facts are altered dramatically for more easily portable weaponry.

"Brandish" means "wave or flourish as a threat or in display," the least disorderly of which would be "flourishing in display."

To flourish is to make an ostentatious gesture, the determination of which ostentation, I suspect, could be wildly subjective...

So a Wisconsinite may, with impunity, stiff-arm a cocked and loaded (but non-ostentatious) handgun up and down Water St. of a Friday evening so long as she doesn't "bark" at the other pedestrians?

Somehow I doubt it.

If anything, Van Hollen's memo succeeded only in maintaining the status quo. We already knew that open carry was legal in Wisconsin, and the only big problem is that many law enforcement officials slap disorderly conduct charges on people for the mere act of doing just that.

Personally, I'm not entirely comfortable with people being allowed to just march around on public property with a handgun strapped to their side (I have far less of a problem with hunting rifles), and suspect the whole issue could be cleared up by disallowing that entirely--but I'm also realistic enough to understand that that's not likely to happen any time soon.

So in the meantime, it would be wise to decide what does and does not actually constitute disorderly conduct. Mowing the lawn with your legally registered firearm holstered to your person? Being that you're on your own property, I would definitely agree that that's hardly disorderly. But when someone takes a piece out into the public sphere? Kind of ridiculous and, I would agree, worthy of some attention by police.

Gun rights advocates, like John Pierce, a founder of OpenCarry.org, often argue that the act of open carry is a political one, done to make a point: "People who open carry do not do so to get attention. They do so to make a political point, in many cases, just like a same sex couple going out of their way to hold hands in public."

First of all, you have to go way more out of your way to carry a gun than to hold someones hand, and same-sex PDA on its own cannot be used as a weapon in an argument or lead to someone getting accidentally shot. So I'm not entirely sure the two are exactly analogous.

Secondly, if "people who open carry do not do so to get attention," then they're naive. Lugging around a weapon will always draw attention to yourself, whether it's a handgun, a rifle, or a sword. To think otherwise is just silly. But I believe him when he says that it's also done to make a political point, and in Wisconsin, they have that right.

Just as our police have the right to ask them a few questions about what they're doing packing while shopping at Menards.

It seems like what this comes down to is the need for more discretion--by both sides--and far clearer language in the law. Not just a memo.

(photo by barjack on Flickr)

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.

Van Hollen can't get his story straight

First, Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen claimed that "There was no discussion with anybody involved in leadership with the Republican Party (or the McCain Campaign) about this lawsuit before it was brought." Then he said he had "no reason to believe” any of his aides discussed the case with the GOP or the McCain campaign.

This was all back in September, but maybe being on the losing end of a lawsuit has jogged his memory. On Oct. 26, Van Hollen was interviewed for a story on CNN, and when asked whether or not lawyers from the GOP had a discussion in his office the week before he filed the suit, he replied that "I understand that's true." When then pressed if he'd been asked by those lawyers to file the suit, he said "No. They may have asked lawyers in my office to file the lawsuit."

That's a bit of a different story than he was first telling when the whole thing came up back in September.

If there is an appeal of the ruling in this case, I would ask and hope that those handling it take a serious look at this man's various and contradictory statements. There's something seriously amiss when our Attorney General keeps changing his story about whether or not partisan politics had any influence over something as important as election law.

See the interview here (scroll down).

Lost Albatross word cloud

Courtesy of Wordle. Clearly, I talk about Van Hollen and McCain way too much.

h/t Daily Mitzvah.

Casting off the ballot casters

In the push to bring their states into compliance with HAVA, it looks like many have gone too far. According to a recent study by the New York Times:

Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.

The study didn't find any particularly partisan reasons for these purges, which is good, but it does, I think, illustrate what can happen when we value kicking people off the rolls over getting them properly registered.

This certainly isn't true across the board, but more Democrats seem primarily concerned with making sure anyone and everyone who can vote is able to do so, whereas more Republicans seem primarily concerned with making sure anyone and everyone who cannot vote is not able to do so. It's a notable difference in philosophies. Both are important, but I happen to believe that the former should be our priority.

As for these swing states' overzealous and improper enforcement of HAVA requirements, I can't help but be reminded of the voter registration controversy here in Wisconsin. Aside from the fact that it's looking more and more like Attorney General Van Hollen filed it for somewhat dubious, partisan reasons, I'm left wondering just how effective it's possible for HAVA to be in its current incarnation. It seems to be wreaking havoc all over the country.

Yes, our voting system needs overhauling--you've only to refer to the 2000 elections in Florida and the 2004 elections in Ohio for prime examples of why--but I'm not convinced that this is the way to go about it. Fact is, the spectre of voter fraud so often and ominously raised is rather flimsy. Cases of individual voter fraud are few and far between, and hardly merit the panic and radical action (ID requirements, for instance) so often being called for.

According to truthaboutfraud.org, in the 2004 elections in Wisconsin:

...allegations yielded only 7 substantiated cases of individuals knowingly casting invalid votes that counted -- all persons with felony convictions. This amounts to a rate of 0.0025% within Milwaukee and 0.0002% within the state as a whole. None of these problems could have been resolved by requiring photo ID at the polls.

So while it's important to make sure that people legally barred from voting--or people who don't exist in the first place--don't cast ballots, it's not nearly so pressing and huge an issue as some folks would have us believe. Shouldn't we be more concerned with things like hackable ballot machines without paper trails? Provisional ballots not being counted? Disenfranchisement of certain legal voters?

Fact is, there are far more crucial issues in our election system that need addressing, too. Perhaps we should revisit HAVA. Absolutely we should make sure that states are following appropriate procedures when checking voter registration databases instead of wildly purging thousands from the rolls based on incorrect information. Again, the NYT:

In Michigan, some 33,000 voters were removed from the rolls in August, a figure that is far higher than the number of deaths in the state during the same period — about 7,100 — or the number of people who moved out of the state — about 4,400, according to data from the Postal Service.

In Colorado, some 37,000 people were removed from the rolls in the three weeks after July 21. During that time, about 5,100 people moved out of the state and about 2,400 died, according to postal data and death records.

In Louisiana, at least 18,000 people were dropped from the rolls in the five weeks after July 23. Over the same period, at least 1,600 people moved out of state and at least 3,300 died.

This could very well lead to some serious problems come election day, as these tens of thousands of people unfairly removed from lists show up at the polls expecting to cast their ballots, only to meet challenges from party officials or election workers.

Frankly, registration and election laws in this country are a mess. We need a standardized, streamlined, and as fool-proof as possible system of checking registrations. We need ballot machines, like the optical scanner versions we have in Wisconsin, that are 1) easy to read and fill out, 2) electronic and so easy to count, and 3) still have a paper trail (plus, there's pretty much nothing to hack in these). We need same-day and motor-voter registration laws, like those in Wisconsin, for the entire country. And heck, while we're at it, why not consider holding elections on weekends, and let them span two days instead of just one? It would make it easier for people to find time to vote, and allow for more time to count all of the ballots, instead of this weird insistance on having results the same day.

Making sure that every eligible voter gets to have their say should be the priority.

Blaska, taking one for the useless team

I'd say it's almost comforting to see perpetual Madison gadfly, David Blaska, still alive and at his usual lame antics, but at this point it's just tiresome and wasteful.

What's he up to now, you ask in morbid curiosity? Why, suing the Madison school district and MTI, of course!

A conservative legal group sued Madison’s school district, school board and teachers union Wednesday over what it calls illegal labor contracts the district continues to honor. 

The lawsuit was filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on behalf of David Blaska, a well-known conservative blogger living in Madison, according to Dane County Circuit Court records. 

The suit alleges the district’s contracts with Madison Teachers Inc. for the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years violate Act 10, Gov. Scott Walker’s signature 2011 legislation that all but eliminated collective bargaining rights for most public employees. Blaska requests a declaration that the contracts are illegal and void, and an injunction to prohibit the contracts from being enforced, according to a copy of the lawsuit provided by WILL. 

Thing is, the district and MTI negotiated their current contract before the state Supreme Court made its final ruling upholding Act 10 as constitutional (which is a whole other can of worms). So, it's pretty straightforward to say that the current contract is perfectly legal. Once it's up for renewal, then you'd have a legitimate fight on your hands.

But that would never stop political hacks like Blaska (and everyone's favorite conservative hack defender, Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel of WILL) from staging wasteful theatrics like this.

It's almost like someone's paying him to take all the flak to make the big, bold conservative statements du jour so as to keep the more valuable politicos free from such public stain. It would be a familiar tactic, anyway (cough J.B. Van Hollen cough).