Saturday, November 8, 2008

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has gone back to court to compel tens of thousands of state voters to reverify their registrations.

The case, which would not affect the Nov. 4 results, turns on the state's use of a database of registrations that election officials argue is flawed and could cause many voters to be incorrectly branded as ineligible. Federal law requires states to have the databases in place. But in Wisconsin, problems have resulted in numerous errors when officials tried to verify registrations by comparing them to driver's license and Social Security records.

Mismatches as minor as an incorrect initial caused one out of five voters to be tagged as problems. For that reason, the elections board declined to rely on the matching system before the election. Van Hollen argued that the board was not following the law and went to court against the board in mid-October. A state judge ruled against him, but he appealed that ruling yesterday to Wisconsin's Court of Appeals, which could refer the case to the state Supreme Court.

"I'm very sorry to see the attorney general waste more of taxpayers' money pursuing a decision which he is not likely to get," said Lester A. Pines, who represented the elections board.

The initial case raised charges of partisanship from Democrats because it asked for the reverifications to be done before Nov. 4. Van Hollen is a Republican and was co-chair in Wisconsin for John McCain's presidential campaign. The elections board is a bipartisan panel of six retired judges.

-- Mary Pat Flaherty