Did everyone see the headline in the Journal Sentinel today?Voter fraud

[gizmo1979]

Police Fbi join investigation into possible voter fraud.1200 votes cast by invalid addresses,ooh that'll make a difference,where were they in Ohio?

[katinmn]

1. can you post a link?

[gizmo1979]

2. link is here hope it works I'am semi computer impaired

http://www.jsonline.com/

[ooglymoogly]

3. must be democratic or they wouldn't be interested

[JAbuchan08]

4. Insert clever one-liner comparing

media coverage of Washington State vs. coverage of Ohio, Florida and every other state in the union.

[katinmn]

5. Appears like the J-S is taking a close interest.

That's really good. Just a handful of newspapers have done that. Most just report talking points.

[AllyCat]

6. Is the vote counted in Wisconsin counties using that central

tabulator thingy? I remember an official saying that's how it was done. The optical scanners sent their data to the central tabulator (made by Sequoia or Diebold) and that's where the code changes could take place to change the votes.

[sybylla]

8. Each county is different

Milwaukee may do things that way, but other counties differ.

My county, for example, counts all the ballots in a backroom of the county clerk's office with the exception of one municipality that uses lever machines. No transmission of anything takes place. That doesn't mean the tabulators are accurate, but it does eliminate the risk of fraud through the modem.

Regardless, the JS is pointing out a problem with recordkeeping on the people who cast ballots. The central tabulator would play no role in that.

[AllyCat]

9. I understand this is a different issue.

Greg Borowski (the author of the JS article) is telling me the central tabulator is just a glorified calculator and that the actual votes in Milwaukee County are done in each city (Tosa counts theirs and sends it to the county, Shorewood counts theirs and sends it to the county, etc).

But what I'm not getting clear is if the votes are totalled there, then sent to the tabulator...are the two sets of numbers ever compared? Say Tosa has 5,000 votes for Evil Dictator #1 and 3,000 votes for E.D. #2. Shorewood's has 2,000 votes for E.D#1 and 3,000 for E.D. #2. They send this stuff to the County who crunches the numbers through the tabulator and gets 8,000 for #2 and 5,000 for #1...would anybody ever check? Obviously there is an error here, but with so many towns to count...how would we know?

Or, does the tabulator record it not just as a raw total, but shows the number of votes in each municipality which can easily be double-checked with the earlier totals.

And, if the municipality has more than one precinct, how do they know if their municipal glorified calculator works?

Edited to fix crappy spelling.

[LiberalFighter]

10. County Party needs to tabulate on their own for each precinct/ward

And if numbers don't jibe with county then find out why.

[sybylla]

7. Sure, thiings could be done better in Milwaukee, but conservatives

and the JS have been crying fraud for over a decade without any proof of someone voting who shouldn't have. There is a difference between poor recordkeeping and fraud.

What I find quite curious about this article is that they are putting all this effort into investigating a system that will be obsolete by 2006, thanks to HAVA. By then every voter will be associated with a DL number or SS number in a huge-ass $14 million database. I would think that the JS would better serve the state by discussing the current problems with registration and investigating exactly how the new system will fix them.

But I guess that wouldn't help their conservative friends make hay out of a trumped up voting scandal.

[LiberalFighter]

11. Find out who the FBI and police are and see if any of them...

have a different address different from their registration.

[LiberalFighter]

12. People were allowed to cast ballots,

despite filling out same-day registrations with wrong information.

Read the article and it appears that the problem wasn't voter fraud but failure on the part of the election workers.

Invalid addresses?? Did the election workers have the voter show the proper documentation? Utility bill or lease that was not more than 90 days old? What other documentation is required for first time voters?

The other failure on the part of the election workers was not checking the registration form to make sure it was filled out completely and correctly. If it isn't filled out correctly then voting should be denied for that person until they do.

Do the counties have a procedure for this so that the election workers know what they are suppose to do?

[EC]

15. They send out cards to verify the addresses

in past years it has been found that the cards that were sent out were addressed incorrectly, or that the hand writing of voter was so bad the numbers were miss read or that the voter had moved by the time the cards were sent out...no fraud, just misstakes and life....

[gizmo1979]

13. story in Sundays Jounal

by Jim Stingl who says the fbi could of saved alot of time by using a phone book to investigate.One was an aquarium store,but the guy lived upstairs.One guy had a 0 instead of a six in his adress,so it looks like this is much ado about nothing.

[mark414]

14. this is bullshit

if it wasn't milwaukee (read: black folks) they wouldn't be talking about this

the REAL voting problems are the fact that people waited hours to vote in cramped school rooms on broken down voting machines where in the suburbs they're in and out in 10 minutes with state of the art machines

goddamn republicans they're fucking disgusting

[EC]

16. On voting day my Republican boss ran into the office and said

that on the radio (right wing drivel I think Breillings)he heard that a bus full of Democrats from Illinois had just pulled into Local 72 (UAW in Kenosha) to vote illegally...what the truth is: is they were Get Out the Vote people bused in to help drive people to the polls, since Ill. is a blue state, they didn't need them down there, so they sent them up here to help...in fact my bosses daughter who is a Dem and lives in Chicago, was sent with GOTV to Stevens Point to help there...so this is how this gets started...these RW radio shills, spewing all kinds of rot, only to have it repeated over and over until it becomes fact in their minds...