MILWAUKEE, WIS. — Milwaukee may well be the nation’s swing town this year — the biggest city in what seems likely again to be one of the nation’s most evenly divided states. This may be where your next president is made.

Milwaukee’s police say the factory’s dirty.

A police task force this week at last released its report on the 2004 election, a monumental bungle here in which votes outnumbered voters by the thousands. The reaction of the Democratic bien-pensant has been to snarl, to say the problems are already fixed or, mainly, to insist there’s no fraud.

History helps one believe this. Milwaukee had been notably free of corruption for about a century. It’s conveniently close to its antipode, Chicago, city of miracles where the dead long have voted, where governors retire to prison or turn up pseudonymously in corruption cases, as happened this week. Whatever Milwaukee’s flaws, at least we’re not that.

Oh, yeah?

In the 2000 election, there was New York Democratic donor, Constance Milstein, “an ordinary Park Avenue matron,” as she described herself, who came to Milwaukee to round up voters from a homeless shelter and ended up in a flap over whether she bribed them with cigarettes.

In 2004, chicanery included “Operation Elephant Takeover,” in which four Democratic Party workers, including the son of Milwaukee’s congresswoman, donned junior commando garb to slash the tires on 25 Republican vans — again, something entertainingly weird.

But 2004 included much more, eventually enough to trigger a joint probe by the local prosecutor and the U.S. attorney that turned up a mess of illegal voting but led to few prosecutions. Now, the Milwaukee Police Department’s report serves up 67 pages of cases, addresses, numbers, and this conclusion: “The task force believes fraud was committed.” It quotes one of its investigators: “I know I voted in the election, but I can’t be certain it counted.”

The details are damning, with investigators repeatedly blaming not mischance but the flawed combination of an inept election apparatus and the nation’s most porous voting procedures.

Critics reacted by saying the police just repeated earlier findings. The one they trumpet is the 2005 conclusion of U.S. attorney Steve Biskupic that he found no evidence of a broad conspiracy to steal 2004’s election.

Mr. Biskupic, however, also said in 2005 that he found lots of evidence of cheating, only he couldn’t pin it on any individual because of wretched record-keeping. This, too, is what the police fleshed out this week.

They found that at least 220 felons voted, illegally. Others served, illegally, to register people. Because of bad record-keeping, few could be prosecuted and, say police, it’s likely the number is higher.

Police found that campaign workers brought to Wisconsin for the final days voted, though their homes to which they immediately returned were in other states. One went back to England. “The belief of the investigators is that each of these persons had to commit multiple criminal acts” to vote, the report says.

Investigators even found a dead man recorded as casting a ballot. Chicago’s got nothing on us.

And it’s probably going to happen again. Among those who downplay the fraud, the line has been that a new statewide voter database will cure all this. Not so, say police: Since anyone in Wisconsin can register upon showing up to vote and since Wisconsin has lax identification requirements — library cards, leases, another voter’s say-so will do — it’s easy to get onto the rolls. Ever after, all one must do is show up and give a name and address, which are supposed to be your own. Any checking comes weeks later, after the votes are tallied.

Investigators’ top recommendation is to ditch same-day registration. It simply doesn’t allow time to catch mistakes or fraud. Failing that, they said, the state should beef up ID requirements. Or, “in the absence of any substantive change,” the state could train poll workers to spot ringers as best they can.

Guess which option the city went with? Number three, dropping $600,000 on it. Meanwhile, Governor Doyle said, “I’m not sure why the Milwaukee Police Department should be the one deciding what the voting policy is.”

Here’s why: Because they’re police, they spotted crimes, and the governor seems uninterested. Same-day registration is seen fondly by many here, and a bill to undo it is stalled. Mr. Doyle, a Democrat, has three times vetoed bills to strengthen identification rules, even after lawmakers promised free IDs to the poor. His preferred tactic is to denounce worry as partisanship and to pretend nothing’s wrong.

Yet something plainly is. Toward the end, the police report’s tone deviates from monotone into disgust: “We have been told, ad nauseam, that ‘every vote counts,'” investigators write, yet members of an unnamed 527 group and an unspecified major party showed up, understood the rules, and broke them. This was found only by chance. “The aforementioned out-of-state campaign workers know that they have been discovered. And they also know that nothing has happened to them,” investigators italicized. This is an invitation to game the system in a battleground state with laws that make it unlikely such games will be caught or punished. Worse, one half of a divided polity has no apparent interest in changing that or even acknowledging there’s a problem.

Out of this corruption may well come your next president’s deciding margin. You’ve been warned.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.