The Independent View: Wisconsin’s Voter-ID Law Takes Effect for April 5 Primary

Noted voting-rights expert Allan Lichtman, a Professor of history at American University, says the Wisconsin Voter-ID law “represents the first time since the era of the literacy test that state officials have told eligible voters that they cannot exercise their fundamental right to vote, not in the next election, probably ever.”

There is a clear racial disparity in terms of who is most impacted by the law. In 2012, African-American voters in Wisconsin were 1.7 times as likely as white voters to lack a driver’s license or State Photo ID, and Latino voters were 2.6 times as likely as white voters to lack such ID. More than 60 percent of people who’ve requested a photo ID for voting from the DMV have been black or Hispanic, according to legal filings.

The law also targets students. Student IDs from most public and private universities and colleges are not accepted because they don’t contain signatures or a two-year expiration date, compared to a ten-year expiration for driver’s licenses. “The standard student ID at only three of the University of Wisconsin’s 13 four-year schools and at seven of the state’s 23 private colleges can be used as a voter photo ID,” according to Common Cause Wisconsin.

That means many schools, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are issuing separate IDs for students to vote, an expensive and time-consuming process for students and administrators. Students who use the new IDs will also have to bring proof of enrollment from their schools, an extra burden of proof that only applies to younger voters. “They’re trying to suppress the votes of students,” says Analiese Eicher, Program Director at One Wisconsin Now and a graduate of UW-Madison. “There’s no other reason.”

Getting an ID from the DMV, which has very limited hours, is even more inconvenient. Writes Emily Mills in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Right now, the dirty little open secret of Wisconsin is that just 31 of our 92 DMVs maintain normal Monday through Friday business hours. Forty-nine of them operate only two days a week. One, in Sauk City, is open for just a few days a year. Only two are open at 5 p.m., and just three are open on weekends. For the whole state.

To exacerbate matters, Wisconsin has allocated no money to educate voters about the new law, as required by the legislation, and Republicans have dismantled the non-partisan Government Accountability Board in charge of supervising elections.

This is all happening despite the fact that voter impersonation, the stated rationale for the law, is virtually nonexistent in Wisconsin. “The defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past,” wrote Judge Lynn Adelman of the U.S. District Court in Wisconsin. “It is absolutely clear that Act 23 will prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes.” Adelman was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, who ruled that Wisconsin’s law was “materially identical” to the Indiana Voter-ID law approved by the Supreme Court in 2008, even though Wisconsin’s bill is significantly stricter and impacts many more voters.

The Voter-ID law is just one of many new voting restrictions passed by Republicans in Wisconsin since 2011. Most notably, the State Legislature also eliminated early-voting hours on nights and weekends, GOP State Senator Glenn Grothman said he wanted to “nip this in the bud” before early voting in cities like Milwaukee and Madison spread to other parts of the state, and made it virtually impossible for grassroots groups to conduct voter-registration drives.

Since 2011, the State of Wisconsin has twice reduced in-person absentee (“early”) voting, introduced restrictions on voter registration, changed its residency requirements, enacted a law that encourages invasive poll monitoring, eliminated straight-ticket voting on the official ballot, eliminated for most, but not all, citizens the option to obtain an absentee ballot by fax or email, and imposed a voter identification “Voter ID”) requirement.

“There have been so many anti-voting laws in this state, it’s hard to keep track,” says Eicher.

Wisconsin has historically ran elections better than almost anywhere in the country, with consistently high voter turnout and reforms like Election Day registration in place since the 1970s. All that changed when Scott Walker and the Republican legislature took over the state in 2011.

“It’s just, I think, sad when a political party, my political party, has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics,” Republican State Senator Dale Schultz, a rare dissenter, said in 2014. “We should be pitching as political parties our ideas for improving things in the future rather than mucking around in the mechanics and making it more confrontational at our voting sites and trying to suppress the vote.”