In a scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, is watching a play and reacts to a character who is excessively vowing eternal love for her husband with, “The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.” Queen Gertrude saw the exaggerated passion for what it was – evidence that the opposite of what was being said was true. When it comes to the integrity of Wisconsin’s elections, Molly Beck, who writes for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, is a lady who doth protest too much. She is feverishly working against the Federal Department of Justice’s (DOJ) plan to ensure verifiable elections in Wisconsin and across the country with at least weekly articles desperately and dishonestly contradicting the legitimacy of the serious flaws in the State’s election system. Ask yourself, “why?”
In her latest article last week, Beck enlisted Don Millis, Chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), to convince the public that the DOJ’s warning to states that “any election officer, including the chief election officer of the state, who knowingly retains noncitizens on the state’s voter list or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots would be subject to criminal liability” is part of nationwide focus on election integrity that is a baseless waste of time.
In a letter Millis sent in response to the DOJ, he deliberately used misinformation and deflection to bury the truth. Beck reports that Millis “noted the state Commission provides guidance and oversight, but elections in Wisconsin are administered by clerks in nearly 1,900 municipalities.” She quoted from Millis’s letter, “Other than in very limited circumstances, WEC has no authority to remove voters from Wisconsin’s Statewide Voter Registration List of active voters.” Millis goes on to say “WEC is committed to assisting municipal clerks with identifying possible ineligible voters so that clerks can determine whether those voters should be removed from Wisconsin’s Statewide Voter Registration List of active voters.”
Here is the truth. The Wisconsin Elections Commission was established by the Wisconsin Legislature in 2015 to administer and enforce election laws in the State. It is the State’s election authority. Millis tried to create the impression that local election clerks are the elections authority by saying the elections are “administered” by the clerks. Local clerks throughout the state diligently oversee the tasks associated with conducting elections, but ask any one of them and you will learn they rely on the WEC to understand how things are supposed to be done.
Molly Beck, Don Millis, and every other member of the WEC, along with every elected member of the state Legislature fully understand the vulnerabilities in the Wisconsin election system that make verifiability (tying every vote cast to the name of a currently eligible voter) impossible and cheating highly probable. Ask yourself why they absolutely refuse to acknowledge and correct this.
In 2002, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed. It requires states to develop a “single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive, computerized statewide voter registration list.” The WEC maintains a website called Badger Voters. https://badgervoters.wi.gov/
The site describes itself as a “simple, automated way for the public to request voter data lists…” and among the things that can be done on the site is “request voter data from the Wisconsin Voter Registration System.”
The WEC insists on maintaining a Voter Registration List that, as of last week, contains a total of almost 8.4 million names. According to the US Census Bureau, there are an estimated 4.7 million voting age adults residing in Wisconsin.
The WEC creates deliberate and unnecessary confusion and potential for fraud by categorizing voters as either active or inactive. As of last week, nearly 3.6 million were listed as active voters and nearly 4.8 million were listed as inactive.
Included on the inactive list are people who at some point in the past registered to vote in Wisconsin but haven’t voted in years, moved out of the state, died, lost eligibility by being convicted of a felony, or were ruled incompetent. No voter on the inactive list can vote without reregistering, so ask yourself why the WEC insists on maintaining these names on the list at all.
Beck’s latest article focuses on a DOJ letter specific to noncitizen voting, but this is only a small part of the much broader scope of the problem in Wisconsin. Cybercrime is the fastest growing type of crime in the world, and the FBI currently logs over 2,500 cybercrimes daily. Hacking into voter lists to create fraudulent ballots is expected to increase with the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI). A list of nearly 5 million real people, who are ineligible voters on an “inactive” list, is a rich reservoir for sophisticated hackers to commit cybercrime. Ask yourself why anyone would object to eliminating this risk?
Beck concludes her article with “Trump and his allies have long claimed that people living illegally in the United States pose a threat to election security, though several studies have found that voting by non-U.S. citizens is rare.” Molly Beck knows that Wisconsin has issued more than 250,000 driver’s licenses to noncitizens who are residing in the state legally. Those licenses are identical to the licenses issued to citizens, and a valid driver’s license is all that is needed to register to vote and to cast a vote in Wisconsin. It is literally impossible to verify that there are no noncitizens on the “active” or the “inactive” Registered Voter List in Wisconsin. Ask yourself why designating noncitizen driver’s licenses as “not for voting” is not a high priority of every Wisconsin Legislator and WEC Commission member and a target of serious investigative reporters.
Don Millis was a busy man last week. In addition to helping Molly Beck distract the voters from the real threats posed by the flaws in Wisconsin’s election system, he penned a guest editorial for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he titled “Trump war on absentee ballots will hurt GOP. Wisconsin Republicans need to accept reality.” In this piece, Millis speculates that “Trump’s war on mail-in ballots will hurt Republican candidates” because of a proposed new United States Postal Service (USPS) requirement that any mail-in ballots must be returned with “intelligent mail barcodes” that can only be read in Milwaukee, Green Bay, or Minneapolis. Millis touts previous work the WEC did to get local USPS officials to deliver the distinctly identifiable absentee ballots directly to local election clerks rather than routing them for sorting with the rest of the mail to Milwaukee, Green Bay, or Minneapolis. This, he says, reduced mail in ballot delays. He speculates the new postal requirement will impact rural areas that are predominantly Republican the most by recreating the problem of ballot delays. He warns that ballots arriving after election day will deprive voters of their vote.
He deliberately avoids the entire point of the push to return to in person voting and vastly underestimates Wisconsin voters, who will gladly trade verifiable elections for the minor inconvenience of showing up at the polls to cast a vote, one of the greatest privileges and responsibilities we have as free people.
In 2005, former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker agreed to cochair a bipartisan Commission to recommend elections reforms. Their final report included a series of recommendations to strengthen election integrity and the confidence of voters in the system. The commission stated, “The electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or confirm the identity of voters.” On the subject of mail in voting, the Commission pointed out the obvious: it increases the risk of fraud because it takes the process outside of the regulated environment of polling locations.
Though Don Millis had plenty of time last week to actively undermine the Trump Administration’s work to secure verifiable elections on behalf of the American people, time apparently ran out when he received the following request for comment from the Publisher of On Wisconsin Outdoors:
“The U.S. Department of Justice knows that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) maintains a state voter registration list that includes more than 4 million ineligible voter names. On Wisconsin Outdoors (OWO) is requesting your comment, as the Chairman of the WEC, on this critical election integrity problem.”
Millis did not respond.
Ask yourself why Don Millis, entrusted with the tremendous responsibility for ensuring Wisconsin’s election integrity, is actively fighting verifiable elections.
Don Millis and Molly Beck are shameless liars with a political agenda, and they are not alone.
Ask yourself why the people of Wisconsin should not expect the Registered Voter List to contain only the names of currently eligible voters.
Ask yourself why every name on the “inactive” Voter List has not been purged and the list eliminated.
Ask yourself why there are 250,000 noncitizens, who are ineligible to vote, in possession of identification that would allow them to register to vote and to cast votes with no questions asked.
Ask yourself why there is so much resistance from those in power and the corrupt media to verifiable elections. The answers will be found within your own good judgment.
