Offensive but true: Green wants to suppress vote

Rep. Mark Green finds it "offensive" that someone has suggested he is trying to suppress the vote in Wisconsin's fall elections in order to help his own chances of being elected governor.

It's offensive, all right. But it's what Green's doing that's offensive, not the fact that someone has called him on it.

What's at stake is whether people who don't bring their drivers license to the polls will be allowed to register on Election Day.

The State Elections Board agreed Wednesday to allow people to provide the last four digits of their Social Security numbers in lieu of their driver's license numbers, if they have a license but don't have it in their possession. The JS reports:

The move reverses the board's January decision that said people registering to vote on the day of an election must show their licenses or provide the license numbers. Under the rule, if people were issued a license but forgot to bring it, they would not have been allowed to vote until they showed it or provided the numbers.

The Republican Party of Wisconsin immediately decried the change, saying it thwarts attempts to stop voter fraud. The GOP also said the change flies in the face of a federal law requiring registrants to give driver's license numbers.

The federal Help America Vote Act requires people who register at polling places to provide their driver's license numbers. If a registrant has no current or valid operator's license, the law allows for the person to use the last four digits of his or her Social Security number.

So it's fine, if you don't have a driver's license, to use your SS number. But if you have a license and left it at home you have to go back and get it -- or you're supposed to remember your driver's license number? Back to the story:

Michael Maistelman, an attorney for the Democratic Party, contended that the federal law contains a provision that allows the state to determine the type of information those registering to vote should provide.

State law, he said, allows either the driver's license numbers or the last four digits of the Social Security number. More than a dozen other states, including Minnesota and New Hampshire, have the same practice, Maistelman said...

Before the vote, Maistelman said: "The reason Mark Green is doing this is for obvious reasons. Why does Mark Green want to require people if they don't have their driver's license number to go home and get it?"

Interrupted [board member John] Savage, "It's because he wants an honest election."

"Obviously Mark Green realizes that this could hurt his chances running for governor. So he wants to put forward some type of institutional voter suppression, I believe," Maistelman responded.

Maistelman said Green wanted to "suppress certain parts of the voting segment, students, elderly, central city people, people that are more transient, that might not have a driver's license on them at the time" and who typically don't vote Republican.

Green said the Democrat's accusations that he was trying to suppress the vote to improve his chances of winning in November were "offensive."

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin is "desperate to block this law, and I think that is shameful," Green said. "They will do anything to avoid the issue of ballot security. Everybody is entitled to vote, but to vote only once."

How people are going to vote more than once is not at all clear to me. By registering at more than one polling place? State law requires some proof of residency, even if you don't show a driver's license -- a utility bill, a lease, mail received at the address, etc. The double-voting argument is clearly bogus, as the much-publicized investigation of voting "fraud" in the 2004 election proved. People are not voting twice, and Mark Green knows they're not. He doesn't even want them to vote once.

Now Green and Rep. F. Jim Sensenbrenner have asked the federal Justice Dept. to step in. They will go to any length to try to keep the poor and elderly away from the polls in November. That's what's offensive.