Report shows same day voter registration errors

MILWAUKEE -- A first of its kind study has revealed same day voter registration leading to a lot of errors! The watchdog group Wisconsin Grandsons of Liberty conducted the study on all same day voter registrations in Milwaukee County for the April 5th election last year, and out of over 11,000 registrations, 33 percent of them contained an error of some type.

Some of those errors were minor things, like the elector forgetting to check on the form that they were a new voter, but some were bigger issues. For example, in nearly 1,500 ballots, the voters' proof of residency was not properly documented by the registrar. "If the poll worker is not signing the form, or listing what the document was, and if it had a document number listing, then how do you know the poll worker actually verified the person's credentials?" Larry Gamble with the Wisconsin Grandsons of Liberty said.

Other errors include cases of voters using out-of-state driver's licenses as their identification, and many people violated corroborating regulations. "We had 142 cases where somebody needed a corroborator in order to be able to vote, but then they turned right around and corroborated for another voter who was registering, which is improper," Gamble said.

The Wisconsin Grandsons of Liberty handed over their findings to the Milwaukee County Election Commission, which hopes poll workers will be required to undergo more in-depth training. "I would like to see some changes made, where the elections process is cleaned up, to where in the future, when we do one of these studies, we don't see the errors created by the poll workers," Gamble said.

Since the Milwaukee County Election Commission just received the same day voter registration study Wednesday, no one was available to comment on the findings. However, the Wisconsin Democratic Party said in a statement: "Nothing the 'Grandsons of Liberty' produced should be believed." They say this is a "despicable organization that has been involved in voter intimidation and suppressing minority votes."