Employing the poisonous principle all too common in our political discourse - if you say something often enough, regardless of the facts, people just might think it's true - Christa Dankert's Dec. 2 op-ed, GAB reveals Van Hollen wrongly pursued fraud,"" trots out a series of talking points to impugn Attorney General Van Hollen's lawsuit against the Government Accountability Board as an attempt at voter disenfranchisement. Her support for this truly remarkable proposition? Some people move, some people don't have driver's licenses, and some people's middle initials won't match other government databases. Implicit in her argument is the proposition that the lawsuit would seek to deny the right to vote to anyone whose voter information didn't match with driver's information.
The problem with Ms. Dankert's argument? The facts.
Van Hollen's lawsuit did not seek the removal of a single eligible voter from the voter list because they didn't have a driver's license or solely because of a database mismatch. Van Hollen's lawsuit asked that voter registrations be cross-checked against government databases as required by law. Running checks doesn't disenfranchise a single person. Indeed, after the election, the Government Accountability Board announced its intention to perform all of the cross-checks Van Hollen's lawsuit demanded they perform. Will Dankert now claim the Government Accountability Board is disenfranchising voters? Of course not. Dankert is far more concerned with constructing a boogeyman than intellectual consistency.
Dankert closes her piece by suggesting that electoral fraud is ok so long as it isn't enough to change the outcome of an election. The fundamental point Dankert misses is that Van Hollen's office doesn't prosecute electoral fraud for the purpose of helping out a chosen candidate. The Wisconsin Department of Justice investigates and prosecutes these cases because eligible voters have a right to have their votes count, undiluted by fraud. The right to vote isn't less important if your vote didn't change the outcome. Simply put, the law doesn't condone illegal voting if election results exceed the ""margin of fraud."" No electoral fraud is acceptable, and those who criminally seek to undermine our most fundamental political freedom should pay a serious penalty.
- Kevin St. John
Special Assistant Attorney General, Wisconsin Dept. of Justice
