Here's a hint for all those pious-posin', cheatin'-seekin' Republicans who say they want to clean up that smaller-than-a-gnat's-knee voter fraud problem in Milwaukee, but who really want to discourage impoverished Democrats (especially black ones) from voting.

Follow your friend Sheriff David Clarke's lead. Keep 'em locked up on election days. Hold 'em in the hoosegow until the final vote is counted.

Don't worry about the niceties. It doesn't matter if these people did anything wrong. What matters is that jailing folks on Election Day keeps them from voting Democratic once, much less twice.

And it doesn't matter if you have to violate a court order to do it, or even if the inmates are treated decently, because most of them are poor and black and so -- here comes the important part -- nobody cares.

Clarke and his staff, in just two years, managed to hold more than 16,000 inmates more than 30 hours in the jail's booking room in violation of a legally binding consent decree. The practice ended in April 2004, shortly after the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee Inc. and the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin Foundation Inc. uncovered it.

The jail inmates were held in filthy, degrading conditions without beds or blankets. They were denied medications, packed for hours at a time into cells not designed for that purpose, and fed sandwiches so bad that many used them as pillows, according to court documents.

Did you hear a big media outcry? Did the U.S. attorney hold a press conference?

To be fair, the media were busy overcovering the voting day problems in Milwaukee. How can we expect the press to cover the maltreatment of thousands and thousands of poor people when there are a dozen illicit voters in the city and (gasp!) sloppy record keeping in the city Election Commission?

Clarke may be on to something. He sure has shown how to separate poor people from their constitutional right to vote without having the media or elected officials raise an objection, or even an eyebrow.

Yes, some of the improperly held detainees were felons legally prohibited from voting anyway.

But some -- maybe a lot of them -- were not. Lots of people end up in jail for misdemeanors, or even for irritating a cop on a bad day.

It's not clear how many people lost their right to vote thanks to Clarke and his mismanaged minions, but the large numbers of violations in election months make it an overwhelmingly good bet that some people's voting rights were trampled. Whether the Sheriff Department's failure to respect voting rights came through indifference, incompetence, or deliberate misdeed, someone at the top should be held accountable.

*Clarke wins term as sheriff
**Clarke finishes third in Milwaukee mayoral primary.

Source of violation data: Benjamin Suesskind, Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee Inc., statistical breakdown categorizing the number of inmates held in the Milwaukee County Jail by month and their length of stay.

Maybe the Sheriff's Department disenfranchised hundreds of people. On the other hand, maybe only a dozen wrongly lost their right to vote, which might mean the lock-'em-up plan is not a cost-effective voter suppression strategy for Republicans.

A dozen people -- or even one person -- deprived of their right to vote should, however, motivate the government lawyers so zealously tracking down and prosecuting a handful of illegal voters to put the same energy and resources into tracking down and prosecuting the people most responsible for wrongfully disenfranchising potential voters.

Failure by prosecutors to protect the voting rights of the poor while prosecuting poor people for abusing those same rights would only acknowledge the existence of a double standard that no healthy community can afford.

Gretchen Schuldt, a former Milwaukee newspaper reporter, runs the Web site storyhill.net.

The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of OnMilwaukee.com, its advertisers or editorial staff.

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