Just Tell Us Which Laws We Should Enforce

Yesterday, Mike McCabe of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign wrote an editorial in the Capital Times, arguing Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen\’s lawsuit is a \”fool\’s mission.\”  Essentially, McCabe says we shouldn\’t enforce the current federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA), because it might upset some people (which is kind of the purpose of a lawsuit):

No matter the outcome in court, the one thing his action surely will do is hopelessly divide voters into two camps — those (mostly Republicans) who believe he\’s protecting election integrity and those (chiefly Democrats) who think he\’s messing with the vote and trying to rig the election for his guy.

Then he starts hitting all the typical lefty talking points – that somehow Florida and Ohio were \”stolen\” by Republicans:

It is no coincidence that Ohio and Florida were the sites of ugly election controversies in the last two presidential elections that left lingering questions about whether eligible voters were improperly prevented from casting ballots and whether votes were properly counted.

In fact, the federal law Wisconsin is now thumbing its nose at was passed in response to the debacle in Florida. That fact that we remain noncompliant actually ensures that such a disaster (and it is only considered a disaster because Bush won, incidentally) will be more likely to occur. Who knows – our system could be rampant with fraud right now – but because we don\’t have a way of accurately checking who is voting, there\’s no way to know. Whatever.

Then, McCabe takes personal credit for creating the current mess we\’re in:

That\’s why it behooves us to make sure political party leaders have no place in running our elections. And it\’s why reform groups like the Democracy Campaign fought so hard to pass ethics reform legislation that created a new politically independent agency under the direction of a nonpartisan board of retired judges to administer elections as well as enforce campaign finance, ethics and lobbying laws.

Uh, yeah – that \”independent\” board he\’s talking about is the Government Accountability Board (GAB), the same board that refuses to follow the federal law.  So it makes perfect sense that he opposes Van Hollen\’s lawsuit – the AG is suing McCabe\’s personal voter fraud machine.

Yet the most interesting part of McCabe\’s message is the messenger himself.  Here\’s a guy who has an aneurysm when a single legislator fails to report the workplace of a campaign contributor on their finance reports.  He\’s made his name preying on the carcass of Scott Jensen, arguing he should get the death sentence for breaking a law that actually really doesn\’t exist.  (This isn\’t to say Jensen didn\’t do some things that were wrong, they just weren\’t technically illegal.)

So I just hope we can get some clarification from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign – just tell us which laws we should enforce with the full power of the state, and which laws we should completely ignore.  Somehow, I think they\’ll opt to ignore the law that allows the theft of thousands of votes.  Just a hunch.

Hooray, Democracy!