The toughest job in Wisconsin government has to be assuring fair elections at a time when Republicans in power really don’t want the state’s elections to be fair.
The job of the Government Accountability Board (GAB) isn’t easy in a government that has no interest in being accountable.
It actually speaks well of the success of the GAB in overseeing elections in a nonpartisan way that it has been targeted for destruction by what promises to be an even more viciously partisan Republican Legislature.
You know Republicans want politically corrupt elections when they object to having election oversight by a board to which Republican Gov. Scott Walker has appointed five of its six members.
But that’s because Walker still has limited ability to mold the GAB into his party’s right-wing image. The reason Wisconsin’s board is held up nationally as model for trying to prevent corrupt elections are some rare built-in safeguards.
First, the governor must appoint former judges unaffiliated with any political party from a pool of candidates chosen by a panel of appeals court judges.
Then the governor’s nominee must be approved by two-thirds of the state Senate. That means the governor has to appoint someone who can win support from members of both parties.
That extraordinarily fair, bipartisan process was set up in 2008, two years before the tea party election of 2010 that swept Walker and Republicans into control of the governor’s office and the Legislature.
Republicans have been itching to destroy that extraordinarily fair, bipartisan process ever since.
That’s because the official position of the Republican Party—winning elections—is far more important than conducting fair elections. To hell with democracy as long as our side wins.
That’s the driving force behind the barrage of Republican laws to reduce voting periods in urban areas and disenfranchise racial minorities, students and the elderly who might vote Democratic by requiring specific forms of identification they’re less likely to possess and have difficulty acquiring.
Republicans, once the party of Lincoln, shamelessly turn back decades of racial progress to emulate the Jim Crow South by passing laws specifically designed to reduce voting by African Americans.
They’ve also gerrymandered Wisconsin’s Assembly and Senate districts so that even when more Democrats than Republicans vote for legislators, Republicans can retain a legislative majority by concentrating Democratic voters into a smaller number of districts.
GAB’s Role in the John Doe
Republicans determined to kill the umpire whose job is to assure fair elections can’t really criticize the respected, retired judges Walker appoints who make all the board’s election decisions.
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Instead, they claim the board’s staff director, Kevin Kennedy, is somehow deviously manipulating those decisions. Kennedy has served under Republican and Democratic governors ever since joining the state elections board in 1979 when Republican Lee Dreyfus was governor.
But today’s Republicans detest Kennedy for telling the truth about their intentionally dishonest charges of voter fraud, which investigations have found to be infinitesimal, but Republicans try to use as an excuse to make voting more difficult.
In 2012, Kennedy wrote a letter to then-Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald dismissing unfounded allegations of voter fraud in the Racine recall election.
“Speaking frankly on behalf of our agency and local election officials,” Kennedy wrote, “absent direct evidence, I believe continued unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud tend to unnecessarily undermine the confidence that voters have in election officials and the results of the election.”
But what really put the GAB in the Republican crosshairs was learning it had assisted the John Doe investigation into possible money laundering and campaign law violations by Walker’s campaign staff coordinating with supposedly independent right-wing groups that have the ability to hide donors’ identities.
Imagine that. The nonpartisan state board charged with enforcing campaign laws joined Democratic and Republican state prosecutors in investigating whether campaign finance laws were being broken.
The reason behind the GAB’s creation in its extraordinary, nonpartisan form was the last major criminal scandal in state government before John Doe investigations began swirling around Walker’s political activities in Milwaukee and Madison.
In 2001-02, five state legislators and four aides were criminally convicted for routinely using state workers on the public payroll as campaign workers. The widespread legislative scandal ended the political careers of both Republican and Democratic leaders.
What may seem surprising—or maybe not—is the sheer arrogance of current Republican extremists in once again pushing the boundaries of legality and wiping out laws and institutions that have stood for decades in Wisconsin.
Because Republicans now have a majority of right-wing justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court—three of whom have been investigated for ethical lapses themselves—they’re pretty confident whatever they do will be upheld, legal or not.
The only thing that can stop Republicans now is a nonpartisan watchdog assuring fair elections and protecting the rights of all sorts of non-Republican riffraff to vote in a democracy.
