Once again, we are reading story after story about vote fraud that didn't happen in the November elections instead of reading stories about the voter disenfranchisement that actually did happen.

One has to admire the Republican success in promoting a nonexistent issue to the news media. But the media really should spend more time covering the real election problems instead of fraudulent Republican claims.

This happens to be a subject on which I have some direct knowledge. On Nov. 2, I was an Election Day observer for the nonpartisan Election Protection Coalition.

My wife, Kit, and I were assigned to Palmer Street School, a polling place that was to achieve some public notoriety.

Kevin Kennedy, executive director of the Wisconsin Elections Board, showed up at Palmer Street and later complained publicly that election observers there, rather than poll workers, appeared to be "taking charge" of the voting process.

There was a reason for that which has never been told. I will tell all.

But first, let's dispose of the Republican claim that there were 10,000 Milwaukee voters who registered at the polls on Election Day who cannot be sent postcards verifying their addresses.

Republican state Rep. Jeff Stone has used that figure to suggest that thousands of fraudulent votes were cast in Milwaukee. From observing at Palmer Street, I happen to know what accounted for the overwhelming majority of that number.

Do you remember that all-nighter pulled at City Hall to process voter registrations? When Mayor Tom Barrett found out the City Election Commission was desperately behind in processing registrations the day before the election, the mayor, members of his family and city employees worked all night to process registrations.

Well, I hate to break it to the mayor and everyone else who worked so hard, but most of their work was ignored, at least at Palmer Street.

All day long, hundreds of voters were coming in whose names were not on the poll list even though they said they had registered weeks before. They were required to show identification and register again.

It was not until late in the afternoon that the poll supervisor found time to open a large envelope from City Hall that turned out to be just chock-full of those voter registration cards that had been processed late.

Hundreds of Election Day registrations from Palmer Street won't be sent verification cards because they were duplicates of earlier registrations.

Now about these election observers who were accused of taking charge at the polls. Someone had to. But no one did it without authorization.

Voting at Palmer Street wasn't set up in a gymnasium or any other large open space that could have accommodated it. It was jammed into a tiny classroom.

Voters filling out their ballots were literally elbowing other people waiting in line to register or receive ballots. There was one ancient voting machine that broke down several times during the day.

During those breakdowns, legitimate votes were lost. Instead of ballots being inserted into the machine and spit back out if they weren't marked properly, they were simply collected to be inserted in the machine after it was repaired.

Later, a number of those ballots were rejected by the machine. If the voters had known their ballots weren't filled out properly, they would have been allowed to correct them. Instead, they were long gone.

The polling place was woefully understaffed with three elderly poll workers and one supervisor who were clearly overwhelmed by the crush of voters waiting in a line extending outside and down the block.

Before we arrived at noon, the Election Protection Coalition already had telephoned the City Election Commission and received permission to assist the poll workers. Instead of simply observing the chaos, we decided the best thing to do was pitch in and help.

Since our group was nonpartisan, we were allowed to sit behind the table and help check off voters. Others helped outside by directing voters to proper lines by address or whether they needed to register.

That's what we did until mid-afternoon, when two men who claimed to be agents from the state attorney general's office arrived and ordered us to stop assisting the poll workers. They said we couldn't work at the polls because of the T-shirts we were wearing.

We should have known our T-shirts would be too controversial for Election Day. They said: "You Have the Right to Vote."

Two questions for the election investigators:

Would anyone in his right mind wait in line for hours to vote and then get back in line to wait for hours again to commit vote fraud?

And why isn't anyone investigating why Democratic voters in cities had to wait for hours to vote using defective equipment while Republican voters in suburbs and small towns breezed through in minutes?

Joel McNally of Milwaukee writes a weekly column for The Capital Times. E-mail: jmcnally@wi.rr.com

Copyright 2005 The Capital Times

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