Republican lawmaker chastises voter "fraud" while voting on behalf of colleagues
A Republican legislator is taking flack for casting votes in the state Assembly on behalf of his fellow lawmakers.Joel Kleefisch, husband of Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, was caught on video making votes for other Republican legislators not physically in the Assembly. When confronted by the issue, Kleefisch defended himself, stating that it wasn't a practice wholly unknown to that body:
The bathroom counts as the chamber. And the parlor counts as a chamber if you are going to eat.Kleefisch's defense is that his colleagues are technically present when he's casting their votes. But that defense runs counter to what his views on voting supposedly are.
Earlier last year, Kleefisch authored a bill that would have put immense burdens on how citizens in the state could vote in elections, a bill that was "watered down" (yet still controversial) to the voter ID restrictions we have today. For someone who vehemently opposes voter fraud in this state (where virtually none was seen before), Kleefisch's votes on his colleagues' behalf sure seems hypocritical.
Regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans do it -- both parties reportedly take part in voting-by-proxy -- the practice of casting votes for other legislators is still wrong. The issue has long been denounced in the past as well, by none other than Scott Walker himself:
The I-Team has confronted the state on this issue before, back in 1996 -- back when Governor Scott Walker was a state representative, wanting the behavior to stop and the rules to change.If he still holds that opinion, Walker should take this opportunity to tell Kleefisch to stop voting in place of his colleagues immediately. It's not as if he's inaccessible to the governor.
"Change the rule to apply to people we are talking about who aren't in the chamber and aren't aware of what is going on," said Scott Walker.