The real agenda in "voter fraud" campaign

Let's not lose sight, in all of the "voter fraud" hoopla, of what the Republican agenda is really all about.

It is not about fraud. It is about making it harder to vote. It is about discouraging and suppressing the vote among people who are more inclined to vote Democratic.

Lest there be any doubt, consider this agenda from Scott Walker's weekly campaign report;

True reform begins, but does not end, with the photo ID requirement. If you help Scott Walker become our next governor, he will push for:

• A Photo identification requirement to vote (Wisconsin drivers license or state issued identification card).
• An end to same day voter registration (so duplicate voters will be found and so felons can be purged from poll lists in advance of Election Day).
• A return to previous system of absentee ballot process where voters must have a reason to vote absentee (travel, health, etc.) so that municipal staff are not overwhelmed before Election Day with early voting.

What Walker wants to eliminate is almost everything that encourages more voter participation by making it easier to vote - absentee voting, early voting, same-day voter registration.

In the last presidential election, 70,000 people in Milwaukee registered on election day. Not all were new voters; many simply had moved to new addresses but needed to change their registration on election day. Could all of them come to City Hall to change their addresses before election day? Maybe, but many would not have. Nor should they have to.

About 25,000 requested absentee ballots, of which about 8,000 cast their votes before election day at City Hall. Some voted absentee because they were going to be out of town, or were in nursing homes, or unable for some reason to go to the polls on election day.

Others just did it because it was more convenient -- although standing in line for hours at City Hall wasn't exactly a picnic. If you think that was a problem, imagine the 70,000 election day registrants coming to City Hall to register or change their addresses. A nightmare.

What on earth is wrong with making it easier for people to vote? Well, if you're Scott Walker or Mark Green or John Gard or Rick Graber, you want to make it as hard as possible for people in the city to vote -- because Milwaukee votes overwhelmingly for Democrats.

It's true that the same rules would apply statewide. But who is more likely to have the time, the necessary documents, the transportation, and the leisure to take care of registering before some cutoff date 10 days or more before the election? Do you think it's more likely the folks in Brookfield or Elm Grove will have their acts together to do that, or would you put your money on someone in Milwaukee's central city?

A lot of things went wrong last November. But one of the things that went right, in Milwaukee and across Wisconsin, is that voter turnout was higher than it had been in a long, long time. So many voted that in Milwaukee it almost completely overwhelmed the system. (Putting something like 20,000 registration cards under the desk in the Elections Commission office until the night before the election didn't help much, either.)

The solution to the problem isn't to reduce the number of voting, although that would make it easier to handle. The solution is to improve the system so it can cope with large turnouts in a reliable way, with more and better-trained staff a key ingredient.

If Walker and others had their way, the only acceptable piece of ID at the polls would be a Republican Party membership card.

The GOP, aided and abetted by the state's largest newspaper, have done a great job of making people outstate think that some kind of massive voter fraud happened in Milwaukee, and that the only way to "fix" it is to require a photo ID. Lost in the rhetoric is the fact that most people showed a driver's license when they registered. (I did election day registration in November, so I saw it firsthand).

The cry for photo IDs is a phony coverup for the GOP's real intent -- to suppress voter turnout. It will be a tragedy if they stampede the Democrats into some kind of compromise that makes it harder for Democratic constituencies to vote. But that seems to be where this is headed.

Ultimately, if that happens, the Republicans will win a close election they should have lost, because they kept enough Democratic voters away from the polls.

And the Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves.