December 16, 2016 at 2:05 p.m.
A standing ovation for local election officials
A standing ovation for local election officials
As Oneida County clerk Mary Bartelt says, they will be costly and time-consuming. That's especially so with a preposterous request from Harvey Wasserman of the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism, who, among many other things, wants surveillance tapes of rooms where ballots were stored, if any exist, and he wants to know who had keys to those rooms.
The request hints of an imagination gone wild and a serious need for counseling. Based on his 64-item request, Wasserman seems to believe that, across rural and northern Wisconsin, Russian spies and other hooligans were breaking down the doors of town halls to tamper with ballots.
As federal judge Paul Diamond said of Jill Stein's recount effort in Pennsylvania, the request borders on the irrational.
That said, as will come as no surprise to any regular readers of this newspaper, the requestor has every right to make his irrational, conspiracy-theory records request, and state officials have an obligation and duty to fulfill it.
This newspaper does not support the open records law only when it is politically convenient or when we think the request is the work product of sanity. We do so as a matter of principle, and this request - as farcical as we think it is - is valid nonetheless.
So far, municipal and county clerks are fulfilling the requests or preparing to do so, and again that is as it should be. It does give us the opportunity to make several points, however.
First, as the Wisconsin Elections Commission has pointed out to clerks, local officials have tools already within the law to protect themselves from onerous and unreasonable requests. They can ask for clarification, they can contest the request as overly broad and ask that it be narrowed - with a court potentially being the ultimate arbiter - and they can charge reasonable fees, primarily for location, copying, and distribution.
That's all the protection they really need. The law is mostly sufficient to protect the state and taxpayers from nuisance requests such as these, of which there are a growing number.
That said, some cost adjustments may need to be made. Many times those out to harass government officials make voluminous requests and never pick them up. In that case, those making the request should be charged the full amount - both work time and copying - that it cost the taxpayers to produce those records.
That one reform would help ensure that only legitimate requests are made.
We believe, though, that the taxpaying public should continue to have fees and costs waived for legitimate requests in the public interest, in part because transparency is so critical to democracy and in part because taxpayers are already paying the freight. That is, it's part of the civil servant's taxpayer-funded job to provide requested records in the public interest.
With even legitimate requests growing, it may be, as Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) told The Lakeland Times earlier this year, that government at all levels needs to budget more to fulfill the growing number of requests.
To justify such budgeting, we need to think of open records as the infrastructure of transparent, democratic government, just as highways and bridges are the infrastructure of commerce and civil society.
In transportation, Gov. Scott Walker has said new revenues for highways must be accompanied by revenue reductions elsewhere; the same logic should go for public records: Increase the monies available for fulfilling records requests by reducing administrative overhead elsewhere.
That would be easy, in an age of bloated bureaucracies.
Second, it may be tempting for some - and we've had a few lawmakers make this pitch already - to blame the open records law for superfluous requests. The remedy for preposterous requests in this view is to get rid of or weaken the open records law itself.
That's throwing out the baby with the bath water. Any major constitutional right will always be ripe for abuse, and dictators and would-be dictators love to use sporadic abuses to justify doing away with the right altogether.
And so big-government bureaucrats increasingly use terrorism as an excuse to build a police state in which the Fourth Amendment has been shredded, when they should focus on the causes of terrorism instead. And big-government bureaucrats point to those who possess guns illegally as a reason to get rid of gun ownership and the Second Amendment altogether.
Unfortunately, such abuse is the price we pay for rights essential to democratic self-government and individual liberty. We don't sacrifice our freedom of movement and expression and right to privacy to defeat terrorism; we don't surrender our ability to defend ourselves and our families because a few use guns to kill innocent people, for we know that to do so would defeat our ability to control our destinies.
For the same reason, we must not sacrifice openness in government because a few exploit it for personal ideological gain, for that is what they want, a less free and less open government.
So putting up with preposterous requests is the price we pay for our democracy. We need to penalize those who abuse the law when we can, but the law itself is not the problem.
Finally, as to the specific request made to municipal and county clerks by the leftist Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism, when it comes to clerks in the Northwoods and across Wisconsin, that request could not be more misdirected.
Rather than look for manipulation in the wide open spaces of small-town Wisconsin, we suggest the institute might be better off to focus on potential fraud in the urban wards of Milwaukee and Madison.
Through the years, as our annual open-records grades show, our town and county clerks have scored the best grades of all when it comes to transparency. With a few notable exceptions, we have rarely had a problem when it comes to gaining access to public records from local officials.
They run tight ships, they are consistent in their devotion to openness, and the vast majority of clerks and municipal officials work hard to serve their constituents. Transparency is important to them, and so is their personal integrity and honor, and they richly deserve credit for the good work they do.
So let us assure those municipal clerks and local officials, their good deeds do not go unnoticed.
Their work in the presidential recount was especially yeoman, and so we thank them for giving their personal time to the cause of honest elections. They have served us well, and they deserve a standing ovation from the citizens of this state.
No applause is due those who are making the latest requests, but we nonetheless applaud the law that gives them the right to make public fools of themselves.
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