Those who would like to reduce, inhibit, prevent, discourage and suppress the vote in Wisconsin’s urban (read Democratic) areas are in full cry over a Milwaukee Police Department report after investigating how the city conducted the November 2004 election.

Charlie Sykes and Brian Fraley were first to the hunt, but the pack of rabid right-wing commentators won’t be far behind. It has already made National Review online. (Sykes links to National Review, but it links back to his site to access the report. So guess where National Review got it.)

Sykes calls it “a bombshell,” and asks:

will the JS, the mayor, and Democrats in Madison continue to deny that we have a major problem with voter fraud?

We should certainly hope so, because the report from MPD’s Special Investigations Unit says nothing of the kind.

Saying “mistakes were made” does not equal “widespread voter fraud was committed.” Sykes and NR make much of this sentence, in the introduction:

Via MAL Contends - Old habits die hard for Republicans.

Unfortunately, for the GOP many African-Americans remain clueless as to their proper place in American society. A hint: It's not at the ballot box.

So the Republican Party believes.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will hear a voter ID case stemming from an Indiana law targeting poor and minority Americans to keep them from voting.

The Court is likely to decide the case next spring in time for the 2008 presidential elections, thereby possibly delivering a death blow to the Republican Party's national program (administered through the DoJ, such as US Atty's Biskupic's voter fraud cases, and state laws) of suppressing black, elderly and poor voters who skew against voting Republican.

Judge Terence Evans of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in dissent (cases are Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 07-21, and Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita, 07-25) clarifies the issue:

McClatchy Newspapers ran a piece by Greg Gordon Monday noting that the DoJ had conducted the voter fraud witch hunts in numerous states. Some highlights:

 “Former lawyers in the Civil Rights Division, however, said the voter fraud campaign is a partisan effort to disqualify legitimate voters, as occurred in Florida before the 2000 presidential election.” 

"Aggressive purging of the voter rolls tends to have a disproportionate impact on voters who move frequently, live in cities and have names that are more likely to be incorrectly entered into databases," said Joseph Rich, a former chief of the Justice Department's Voting Rights Section who's now an attorney with the liberal-leaning Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.

Today’s Capital Times’ piece by Judith Davidoff and David Callender reveals that Biskupic’s push to investigate alleged voter fraud was not limited to Milwaukee but also targeted the high Democratic-voting areas of the city of Madison and Southeastern Wisconsin. 

Biskupic, after publicly finding no evidence of any widespread pattern of fraud or voter irregularities as part of a bipartisan task force, launched the voter fraud investigations and subsequent prosecutions anyway, precisely in accordance with the national Republican program to suppress Democratic turnout.  

Writes Davidoff and Callender: 

- via MAL Contends
Madison, Wisconsin—An official Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) document contradicts the U.S. prosecutor’s narrative of alleged events that led to the conviction of a Wisconsin Vietnam-era veteran on federal wire fraud charges in 2006.

Jim Henning

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The document, a VA “Statement in Support of Claim,” written by the late Jim Henning, a Shawano County (Wisconsin) Veteran’s Service Officer, argues for an earlier retroactive date for disability benefits for Airman Keith Roberts (1968-74), who was diagnosed by several medical professionals with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after witnessing a fellow airman being crushed to death in the wheel well of a C-54 airplane at a U.S. base in Naples, Italy in 1969.

Henning was known as a passionate and highly ethical advocate for veterans.