Integrity of the Ballot Under Attack

For Immediate Release
April 1, 2010

Contact: Senator Glenn Grothman 1-800-662-1227 - Capitol
262-689-8421 – Cell

Integrity of the Ballot Under Attack

Grothman Rips Democratic Extremists for Trying to Push

Radical 72-Page Bill Through Elections Committee Less than 16 Hours After Hearing

Today, Senator Glenn Grothman vowed to fight Senate Bill 640, a bill which radically changes Wisconsin election law going into this year’s election. The 72-page bill was not even introduced until March 23.
Senate Bill 640 makes many changes to Wisconsin election law including the following:

The bill allows municipalities to set up satellite absentee ballot stations for early voting. These stations apparently could be done in college dorms, outside of bars, or other inappropriate locals.

2) The current open government practice of allowing any citizen to challenge individual ballots would end as monitoring of elections of statewide or national significance would be restricted to people who live within that polling district.

3) Permanent absentee ballot status would be established in which ballots would be sent to people who historically do not vote in low-turnout elections. Currently, permanent absentee ballot status is restricted to people who are confined because of age, physical illness, infirmity, or disabled infinitely making them unable to get to the polls.

4) University IDs could be offered as proof of residence for registration and voting.

5) The increased cost of processing and mailing out the additional absentee ballots is an unfunded mandate that local municipalities will not be able to absorb.

6) Local municipalities will be forced to hire speakers of a foreign language if at least 5% of the adults in their district are not English proficient.

7) The bill proposes to set up a statewide database of voters that the authors said they would hope to link up to a national database.

“This is a shocking power grab some extremist Democrats are trying to change our laws so that more unqualified voters are able to vote and so that we are not able to determine whether or not voting fraud in fact took place,” said Grothman. “That is clearly the motivation behind trying to have a much larger number of permanent absentee voters as well as preventing an individual outside a polling place to object to inappropriate voting.”

“Ironically, the voting change that most Wisconsin citizens request, Voter ID, is about the only thing not included in this far-reaching bill that is being fast-tracked through the State Legislature,” said Grothman.



Contact: Senator Glenn Grothman – 262-689-8421-cell


Republican Women of the North, Northern WI, rwotnorth@gmail.com