When a report by the Special Investigations Unit of the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) jumped into a partisan political debateby siding with Republicans to recommend eliminating voter registration on Election Day and requiring photo IDs at the pollsGov. Jim Doyle wanted to know why MPD should be dictating who can vote in Wisconsin.
The governor wasn’t the only one. Milwaukee’s new police chief, Edward Flynn, wanted to know the same thing. In fact, Flynn immediately began his own internal investigation into who wrote and released the report to restrict voting without giving him, as head of the police department, any chance to review the recommendations.
It’s the job of the police to enforce the law, Flynn suggested, not to issue partisan political reports. “We’re not the Department of Making Policy Recommendations,” he said. Flynn said the report was placed on his desk in its bound, final form just hours before it was released to the news media.
The report is unsigned. The report doesn’t identify the police department “investigators” who made the radical recommendations to change state voting laws that have encouraged widespread voter participation in Wisconsin for decades. In fact, reading the report, it’s a lot easier to find out who doesn’t want to be associated with its recommendations than who does.
The first page of the report is headlined “DISCLAIMERS” in bold, capital letters. It alludes to a task force formed after the 2004 presidential elections to investigate media reports of vote fraud, mainly stemming from unproven allegations from the Republican Party of Wisconsin, then adds: “The recommendations and findings in this report are those of the Special Investigations Unit of the Milwaukee Police Department and do not reflect the views of the United States Department of Justice, the United States Attorney’s Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation or any other member of the task force.”
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In a separate disclaimer, Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm says, essentially, “Me neither.”
So who exactly is the Special Investigations Unit of the MPD, anyway? From the cover of the report, we know it is a unit of the department’s Intelligence Division. This division, headed by Capt. Michael Young, a previous candidate for police chief, is popularly known as the gang squad. It gathers street information on gang activity.
We should be so lucky to have urban street gangs interested in participating in the democratic process. Who knows why former Police Chief Nan Hegerty assigned a voting investigation to the gang squad, but no one can blame Hegerty for not releasing the report while she was still chief. And no one can blame Flynn, the new chief, for being upset that the moldy and contradictory report was released publicly without his authorization.
The report is a major embarrassment to the department. Like the previous investigations by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and district attorney into Republican allegations, the report finds no evidence of any organized vote fraud.
Creating More Obstacles
Then, curiously, after finding nothing to back up the Republican claims of vote fraud, anonymous police department “investigators” join Republicans in calling for the scrapping of Election Day voter registration and requiring photo IDs at the polls, which would create obstacles to voting for the poor and the elderly.
We know why Republicans want to reduce voting by the poor, the black and the elderly and to make voting more difficult for Milwaukee residents in general. They know poor people, black folks, seniors and Milwaukeeans overwhelmingly vote Democratic.
It is blatant Republican opposition to the basic principles of democracy and equality. If they could, Republicans would return to the founding fathers’ original idea of limiting the vote to white, male property owners. They don’t go for these newfangled ideas of extending the vote to blacks, women and people who aren’t wealthy enough to own property.
The racial motivation for requiring photo IDs is that fewer than 45% of all African- American males in Wisconsin have valid driver’s licenses and only 21% of African- American males between 18 and 24 do. We understand the sleazy, political reasons for why Republicans want to make voting more difficult. But why would the Milwaukee Police Department want to join the Republican Party’s transparent crusade against nonexistent vote fraud unless some members of the department also want to elect more Republicans? As the MPD report documents once again, vote fraud has essentially been eliminated by federal laws that would send any voter to prison for voting more than once, a risky act that would make no real difference in any election.
The huge, excited turnouts in this year’s Democratic primaries between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton make us forget that we don’t have a problem with people voting more than once. Our biggest problem, given the usual quality of our choices, is getting people to vote at all.
What’s your take? Write: editor@shepex.com.