Van Hollen Claims on Voter Fraud Are Out of This World
It is long-since known, JB Van Hollen will do anything, go to any length, dispatch any resource at the taxpayer-financed Wisconsin Department of Justice to further his partisan political agenda.
We all remember how Van Hollen’s top lieutenant was seeking help on the health care lawsuit with the Republican State Leadership Committee — one of the biggest Republican campaign outfits in the nation.
We remember how Van Hollen refused to defend the state’s domestic partner registry after saying on the campaign trail that future domestic partner protections were in no way threatened by the ill-fated 2006 state Consitutional amendment to deny some basic decency rights to committed same-sex couples.
But on no other issue has this partisan hack, son of privilege shown his stripes more clearly than on Voter Rights issues.
Time and time again, Van Hollen has strategically promoted the false notion of widespread voter irregularity in Wisconsin.
During the 2010 deliberations on the failed Voter Protection Act, Van Hollen made it known in the capitol in the final hours of the bill’s discussion that he would be announcing some kind of charge against one or two people who may have voted improperly. (As is almost always the case, it was two felons on paper who were not eligible to vote despite being out of prison.)
Now, as the Republicans and Tim Carpenter are trying to slam through the nation’s most restrictive, and of course, unnecessary Voter ID, here comes the an “announcement” from Van Hollen’s task force on voter issues.
Like clockwork.
Van Hollen shot out a press release from his Voter task force letting Wisconsin now, what voter rights allies have been shouting from the rooftops: an infintessimal 14 improper votes have been shown out of the 3 million cast in Wisconsin in 2008.
To put this in perspective. There were 40 UFO sightings in Wisconsin in 2008.
Indeed, there were more than three times as many “documented” sightings of unidentified flying objects than there were documented instances of improper votes.
With all of Van Hollen’s partisan bluster, it cannot be underscored the importance of Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm’s no-nonsense pronouncement:
In the course of our work we have never found any evidence to support allegations of organized, large scale vote fraud or dissuasion. Before we do anything that alters existing access to voting we should make sure we do it for a compelling reason based on a clear need.
It has become clear that any credibility Van Hollen had to lead Wisconsin’s Department Justice as an unbiased prosecutor and law enforcement official has long since evaporated.
Pretty simple. Van Hollen has insisted there is widespread voter fraud. He’s either lying about it, or utterly incompetent in finding it.
After all, if 14 cases of improper voting is widespread fraud, what is Van Hollen doing about the impending extraterrestrials hordes moments away from enslaving humanity.