Saturday, November 24, 2012

Scott Walker Wants To Win, No Matter What It Costs....You

We've already seen that there is no level that Scott Walker won't sink to in order to give him the advantage in an election, no matter the cost....to the taxpayer.

He's squandered an untold amount of taxpayer dollars by having his county staff do his campaign staff's work.

Then Walker and his cronies passed a voter suppression law. Not only did the law force people to pay a poll tax, it didn't work and was eventually struck down as being unconstitutional. Another waste of taxpayer dollars.

Now Walker has decided that his poll workers aren't up to the task and wants to do away with same day registration. Never mind that this is really nothing more than trying to keep people from voting, especially students and the transient.

Like all of Walker's lame-brained ideas, this one won't work either, but it will cost the taxpayers a lot of money:
Wisconsin's 1,400 municipal clerks will likely be against the change. While the governor claimed changing the law would "make it easier for our clerks," to handle registration, rather than volunteer poll workers, a top official with the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association forcefully pushed back.

"It will make it more burdensome," says Sun Prairie City Clerk Dianne Hermann-Brown, a former clerks association president who currently heads the group's election communication committee. "It would be a logistical nightmare."

Keep in mind, the association has not opposed all of Walker's voting proposals. In fact, Hermann-Brown was fiercely criticized by progressives in her recent bid for Dane County Clerk because of her support for eliminating in-person absentee voting during the three days prior to Election Day.

But doing away with same-day registration would force Wisconsin to submit to a number of federal mandates aimed at increasing ballot accessibility, she says.

In particular, the state would have to begin offering voter registration through the Division of Motor Vehicles, a requirement that Hermann-Brown says would lead to inexperienced state officials handling voting rights.

And it would also mean thousands of people streaming into clerks' offices in the weeks preceding an election, which would mean more overtime, more overworked clerks and more taxpayer dollars spent, she says.

Ultimately, more people would arrive to the polls to find they are not registered because of a change of address or other technicality, and would therefore have to cast provisional ballots. In the 2008 presidential election, for instance, only 211 provisional ballots (which are often rejected) were cast here. In other states, there were tens of thousands, according to a Government Accountability Board memo (attached) that makes the case for Election Day registration.
Perhaps Walker could make his next campaign slogan out of his voter suppression follies.

Something like, "If you vote, I can't win."

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