Wauwatosa City Clerk Carla Ledesma has acknowledged to me that within the past 20 days she has altered the city’s voting records from the September 1998 primary election. Why she did it and who she did it for are shocking but the fact that she did it at all was a stunning admission.

Those records indicate - or did indicate before Ledesma tampered with them - that James Sullivan voted in the September primary election in Wauwatosa eight years ago. Sullivan is also listed as having voted in Whitefish Bay in the same election and denies voting that year in Wauwatosa. Sullivan is the Democrat running for the state Senate against incumbent Republican Tom Reynolds and some Reynolds supporters believe Sullivan illegally double-voted in the 1998 election.

Ledesma says she reviewed the voting lists turned in by poll workers and found no record of Sullivan voting in that election in Wauwatosa. She concluded that the voting list at City Hall was therefore in error and "corrected" it. That’s right - she "corrected" a public record to conform with her opinion of what happened. Ledesma admitted to me that this is the only voting record she has ever altered in her years as city clerk. So why did she take this extraordinary action this time? Ledesma doesn’t have an answer. James Sullivan is a Wauwatosa alderman and Ledesma is a public official in the same city. That looks like a lot of motivation to me.

It is unclear to me if Sullivan double-voted or not. He has adamantly denied it and has offered to take a lie detector test. But neither he nor Ledesma have any acceptable explanation for why the voting records show he did vote in Tosa. Ledesma has said the city’s computer program for voting had become "corrupted" over the years but doesn’t say how that would have produced a vote for someone who didn’t vote or why it would have included a name on the list of someone who says he was living in Whitefish Bay. At this point, however, there is not enough evidence to accuse Sullivan of double-voting and unlike some of the overzealous Reynolds supporters, I’m not going to do it.

The more important point is that a government official is tampering with 8-year-old records. If Ledesma was rectifying an obvious mistake in records from an election held a week ago, that would probably be acceptable. But to go back nearly a decade to alter public documents because you have an opinion about them is not only wrong, but likely unethical and certainly unacceptable. If Ledesma wants to conclude the records are wrong, she can issue an opinion to that effect. But to go and destroy a public document that has relevance in a hotly contested election is intolerable.

If Milwaukee County had a real district attorney, he’d begin an immediate investigation and seize all of the Wauwatosa records to prevent Ledesma from altering any of them. Unfortunately, it has Mike McCann, the guy who will never charge any Democrat with anything.

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The Sullivan case comes as Waukesha County District Attorney Paul Bucher is preparing to bring criminal charges against another Democratic state Senate candidate, Donovan Riley. Riley dropped out of his race in eastern Milwaukee County last week as the probe intensifies into his votes in both Chicago and Oconomowoc in the 2000 Gore-Bush election. Riley has not denied doing it.

Do we have to check the voting records of every Democrat running for the Legislature?

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The lefty Milwaukee weekly called the Shepherd Express recently ran a bizarre piece whitewashing the chronic pollution record of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. In the piece, prominent lobbyist Bill Broydrick, who lobbies for MMSD, accused both me and WTMJ’s Charlie Sykes of poisoning public opinion toward MMSD with "vicious personal attacks that are often irrelevant."

OK. I’ve issued some "vicious personal attacks" in my day but not a single one has ever been directed at any employee or representative of MMSD and Broydrick can’t cite one. I instead have commented on the agency’s disastrous mistakes in building the "Deep Tunnel," its overcharging of suburbanites, its failure to separate Milwaukee sewers that overflow with rainwater during storms and its hypocrisy in targeting private companies while dumping thousands of times more pollutants. Broydrick can’t deal with those arguments so he simply lied about what I’ve said.

The funny thing, though, is that Broydrick himself has been more than willing to feed me material supportive of his many controversial clients including Waste Management, Aurora Health Care, AT & T and others. I guess he’s only bothered by "vicious personal attacks" (real or lied about) when they are aimed against, rather than in defense of, his paid clients.

(Mark Belling is the host of a daily WISN radio talk show and a Sunday television show. His column runs Wednesdays in The Freeman.)