Bob CollinsWisconsin and Minnesota officials are investigating how some people voted in both Wisconsin and Minnesota, the Associated Press reports today.
The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board compared its election data with the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office and found several dozen cases in which voters voted twice.
In what are believed to be the first cases filed stemming from the investigation, two men from Menomonie, Wis. were charged late last week with election fraud. One was accused of voting in Wisconsin at the polls, and casting an absentee ballot in Lakeville, Minn. The other was accused of voting at precincts in both states.
It’s not too hard to figure out what happened by reading the AP story. Young people from Minnesota, already registered to vote at their parents’ home, went off to college and registered to vote in Wisconsin.
The only question remaining then is: How often does this happen?
Voting is a particularly archaic system. Each state has its own system and rules and without some method of automatically comparing data between the states, it would appear to be open for some abuse.
In 2004, Slate.com reported that 46,000 people were registered to vote in both New York and Florida. The Orlando Sentinel found 68,000 others registered in both Florida and North Carolina or Georgia.
