[img_assist|nid=44419|title=GOP friendly|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=180|height=139]Daniel Slapczynski, a community columnist on the op ed pages of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has a simple solution to the vote-mangling ways of Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus: Enact the Wisconsin GOP's controversial Voter ID law.
Huh? That's a non sequitur if I ever read one, but Slapczynski is serious. In the April 11 edition of his occasional column in the state's largest and most Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, Slacpczynski cited furor over both JoAnne Kloppenburg's small lead in unofficial returns posted the day after the state Supreme Court election, along with the furor over Nickolaus' error in not counting 14,000 votes from Brookfield, which gave Kloppenburg opponent David Prosser the lead as county canvassing continued statewide. The columnist then wrote:
It would be nice if just one election in Wisconsin could wrap up without the losing side screaming "foul." So how about we finally make it an even playing field and ensure that every vote is legitimate and that every vote counts? Pass voter ID legislation.
Trouble is, Slapczynskyi never quite explains how requiring every Wisconsin voter to show a particular form of official ID at the polls will not only reduce all-but-non-existent vote fraud but, also and more important, prevent partisan elected officials like Nickolaus from screwing up the vote by pushing wrong buttons or in other incompetent or nefarious ways.
Obviously, in the conserve-o-verse -- and on the Journal Sentinel's editorial pages -- logic and deductive reasoning increasingly don't count for much. It's easier to just trot out your preferred solutions and change the subject to serve your agenda, even if that leads to irrelevance. But that's a Republican modus operandi these days, from using "9/11" as an all-purpose justification for any sordid deed to solving all manner of budget problems by seeking more tax cuts. Indeed, if it were ever to become obvious even to Republicans (I know; it's a stretch) that the real fiscal problem was, in fact, those very tax cuts, the current GOP breed probably would respond by proposing to fix that with more tax cuts.
Meanwhile, Republicans are going to fix their own efforts at vote suppression by going for more vote suppression. Which is really what Voter ID is. Slapcyznski concludes with another non-sequitur argument for the GOP scheme:
There are more Democrats in Milwaukee than Republicans. If every one of them legally votes, no Republican will see office in a hundred years. That doesn't sound like a conservative victory to me.
But if Voter ID is enacted, making it harder for many of those Democrats to vote, and if Republican officeholders who count the votes go rogue and reduce trust in government by messing up even more votes, well, those ARE conservative victories.