Unsurprisingly, accusations of shady dealings are
flying. (You might think we're
upright mild-mannered Midwesterners here, but don't forget, this is also the
home of the Milwaukee
Black Voters League, the still-anonymous group that circulated flyers in 2004 with the false claim that traffic citations made city residents ineligible to vote, and subject to arrest if they showed up at the polls.) The
latest story, broken
by Politico's David Catanese on Monday, is that the
not-technically-affiliated-with-the-Republican-Party advocacy group Americans
for Prosperity sent absentee ballot applications to Democratic voters in two
districts where GOP senators are up for recall. Wasn't that nice of them? Just two problems: the mail-in address on the form -- billed as the "Absentee Ballot Application
Processing Center" -- isn't an
official government body, but a
P.O. box in Madison owned by the Wisconsin Family Action PAC. And the application instructs voters to
turn in their absentee ballot by August 11, when election day in districts 2 and 10
is actually August 9. (See a scan
of the form here.)
The story spread quickly to liberal buzz-foci like Talking
Points Memo and The Huffington Post, and by the end of the day the state Democratic Party had filed a
complaint with the state Government Accountability Board, accusing AFP of
violating Wisconsin law by making "a false statement which is intended or tends
to affect voting at an election." Americans for Prosperity state director Matt Seaholm said the incorrect
date was a mistake, and that those forms were meant for AFP members in the
districts with August 16 recalls.
Sadly for conspiracy fans, he's probably telling the truth.
First of all, AFP isn't the only right-leaning group asking
voters to send absentee ballot applications to mystery P.O. boxes. Wisconsin
Right to Life sent voters the same form,
pointing to the same Madison P.O. box; United Sportsmen of Wisconsin, a gun-rights group, used a P.O. box in Waunakee. Those mailings, unlike the ones
from AFP, ask voters explicitly to elect "right-to-life" or "pro-gun"
candidates to the legislature -- not what you'd do if you were trying to trick
Democrats into filling out the application. You've got to figure applications sent to those P.O. boxes
are actually getting forwarded to the relevant county clerks.
The AFP mailer is different, giving no hint that it's meant
for Republicans. So the fraud
narrative goes like this -- Americans for Prosperity sent a deracinated version
of the application form to registered Democrats, intentionally misrepresenting
the election date in order to fool them into disenfranchising themselves.
But if that's so, where are the other Democrats who got the
mailer? Graeme Zielinski, spokesman for the Wisconsin Democratic party, told me
he "suspects" there are more -- but three days after the initial complaint,
there's no evidence that any Democrats other than the two named by Politico
received the misdated forms, much less that lists of Democratic voters were
specifically targeted.
