District attorney, U.S. attorney launch probe into invalid voter addresses in Nov. 2 election

And about time too. On January 20, Mayor Tom Barrett appointed a task force to review problems and procedures after mounting complaints from bloggers and GOP Rep. Jeff Stone. And of course the Journal Sentinel staff have done a good job of analyzing voter data and keeping the story active in the paper as it has developed.

Barrett appointed as one of the main task force investigators Lisa Artison, executive director of the Election Commission. Now isn't that like sending a rabbit out for a head of lettuce?

Thanks to Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann, who said he and U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic agreed to investigate potential problems together.

Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann said he and U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic agreed to investigate potential problems together. The effort will also include the Milwaukee Police Department and the local office of the FBI.

McCann told the newspaper the group of prosecutors and investigators, including one with computer expertise, will try to "see if there was voter fraud or not. That's the major thrust."

Meanwhile, a separate state audit that is to include a focus on Milwaukee's election problems could be put into place as early as today. Those problems ranged from registration cards that weren't processed before the election to absentee ballots that were not counted until weeks after the election.

So here is some of what we have already learned going into this joint investigation, and hopefully we will find clear answers to.

This week, the newspaper reported finding that more than 1,200 votes Nov. 2 came from invalid addresses, with nearly 75% of those coming from people who registered at the polls. Of those, a sample showed about 20% could be explained by data entry errors, such as transposed digits.

In addition, the newspaper found that 186 votes from invalid addresses were among about 5,600 addresses challenged before the election by the state Republican Party as non-existent.

Meanwhile, the newspaper's latest review of the city's records shows several hundred cases in which the same person is recorded as voting twice from the same address, though it appears to be the result of already-registered voters who re-registered to vote and consequently are listed in the database twice.

The Journal Sentinel found 314 cases where this may have occurred with the same address listed twice, and many others cases where people with identical and uncommon names are listed as voting at two addresses - perhaps due to reregistering at their new address on election day.

The 314 cases examined do not appear to be ones where one person was issued two ballots.

They do point, however, toward sloppy or flawed data entry into a system that did not have enough safeguards to prevent duplicate entries or provide enough oversight of those registering to vote to prevent people from doing so twice.

On a practical level, the problem increases the gap between the number of people recorded as having voted (269,212) and the number of ballots cast (277,535) - a difference the newspaper previously placed at about 8,300.

The city's estimates had put the gap at more than 10,000.

Officials still have not fully explained that gap or provided access to registration cards that could not be processed because of illegibility or missing information. Those cards haven't been entered in the city database.

But although they haven't been entered into the database and probably never will, sadly they did vote on November 2, 2004.
Captain Ed continues his "Cheese Wash," and suspects that Lisa Artison may have a sleepless night tonight.

Power Line weighs in noting: "Voter fraud is the great unacknowledged issue of our time."