The Wisconsin voter ID law won’t go into effect, yet. The decision is based on the Wisconsin state constitution.
A judge in Wisconsin’s Dane County granted a temporary injunction barring enforcement of the state’s controversial voter ID law on Tuesday, ruling that enforcing the law on April 3 elections would likely cause irreparable harm.
The Wisconsin State Journal reports that Circuit Judge David Flanagan ruled that a suit by the NAACP’s Milwaukee branch and Voces de la Frontera against Gov. Scott Walker (R) had demonstrated that the lawsuit would probably succeed on its merits. He ordered Walker and the state to immediately cease their efforts to enforce or implement the law, pending a trial on April 16.
“If no injunction is issued, a clearly improper impairment of a most vital element of our society will occur,” Flanagan wrote in his decision, according to the newspaper. “The duty of the court is clear. The case has been made. Irreparable harm is likely to occur in the absence of an injunction.”
The judge in Wisconsin had to deal with Crawford, so we will too. Crawford is the really unfortunate US Supreme Court decision that opened the door to all of these brand new voter suppression laws:
In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court today rejected a challenge to Indiana’s most-restrictive-in-the-nation voter identification law. The American Civil Liberties Union’s case, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board- consolidated with Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita – is an appeal of two lower court decisions that upheld the state’s law requiring voters to present government-issued photo IDs in order to vote. The ACLU argued that the Indiana law creates an unconstitutional burden on voting rights.
“Today’s decision minimizes the very real burden that Indiana’s voter ID law places on tens of thousands of eligible voters who lack a government-issued identification while accepting at face value Indiana’s unsubstantiated claim of voter fraud,” said Ken Falk, Legal Director of the ACLU of Indiana and lead counsel on the case.
In January 2007, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago upheld Indiana’s voter ID law by understating the right of every individual to vote without being subject to undue burdens imposed by the state. There is no evidence that Indiana’s voter ID law is justified by any actual problem of voting fraud, which is already prohibited by various criminal statutes in the state. No cases of in-person voting fraud have been prosecuted in the state in recent history.
The court in Wisconsin drew a distinction between the Indiana law that Crawford allowed and the new Wsconsin voter suppression law for a couple of reasons, one of which was that Indiana allowed those voters denied a standard ballot to vote a provisional ballot and file an affidavit within ten days showing indigency. If they did that, their vote would be counted. Maybe. Provisional balloting is much more complicated than dealing with a standard ballot, and it doesn’t work very well, as a practical matter. In Wisconsin, the voter must accept a provisional ballot and appear within three days and provide a photo ID.
At the time Crawford was decided, the Indiana law was the “most restrictive in the nation”. That’s no longer true. The Wisconsin law is more restrictive than the Indiana law, and that’s a pattern.
One of the many, many things you’ll never hear conservatives talk about regarding these laws is this: they are evolving. They get increasingly restrictive with each pass. Ohio put in a voter ID law in 2005. The moment conservatives came back into power, in 2010, they added further restrictions. Voting enthusiasts and others gathered the requisite signatures and put Ohio’s newest voter suppression law on the ballot for 2012. In Ohio, that means the law doesn’t go into effect until voters have a say. Conservatives responded by threatening to repeal their own law and replace it, which would make the referendum on the law moot. As of today, no voter in Ohio knows which rules will be in place on election day, 2012. Presumably, conservatives will tell us their plans prior to all of us arriving at the polling place on election day, but I wouldn’t count on it.
I think conservative lawyers and the paid pundits who promote these laws should have to explain why the laws they’re pushing through are more restrictive with each passing year. They invented the voter impersonation fraud problem that voter ID laws supposedly address. They could never prove “the problem” existed, and that of course means we on the voter access side will never be able to prove that the increasingly restrictive laws fix “the problem”.
Once we’re untethered from reality, and we are, there’s no end to how far we’ll be told we have to go.
Holden Pattern
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Soonergrunt (mobile)
To my knowledge, the only people who have actually committed voter fraud or vote-registration fraud so far have all been republicans.
Out seems to me that the smart thing to do, of one is truly concerned about electoral integrity is to ban republicans from voting.
kay
@Holden Pattern:
It reminds me of the birth certificate, it really does.
A boring state process that they managed to turn into this mysterious (and malicious!) mystery that can never be solved. Birth records process and voting process are now unknowable.
I don’t know how anyone disproves their unsubstantiated claims of voter impersonation fraud. It’s impossible. We were beat before we started. If I invent a problem, I can also invent the scope of the problem, and the laws needed to fix the problem.
Davis X. Machina
These things can be reversed. Gov. 38% Plurality Paul LePage, and his teabaggy friends in the Augusta legislature, early in his term bulled through an ALEC-drafted law repealing Maine’s 40-year-old same-day, walk-up registration, a law that also limited early in-person voting days. At the same time they had a voter ID law in the hopper.
The first was overturned by referendum(1) — the “citizen’s veto” — and the legislature ‘declined to take action’ on the second, after the nose-count on the referendum pointed out its likely fate.
1. The referendum achieved the required number of signatures for ballot placement in record time, too.
Elliecat
I just want to say that I LOVE the phrases “voting enthusiasts” and “democracy enthusiasts” and plan to use them everywhere I can.
feebog
There is a solution to all of this, which has been adopted in OR in whole and Washington State for the most part; vote by mail. It is becoming increasingly popular here in California as well, with almost half of all ballots being cast by absentee in the last few elections.
Yes, I know that there is a potential for fraud in vote-by-mail, but that has not been the experience in either state. It is a method we should be pushing across the country to fight back against ever more restrictive voting laws.
WaterGirl
@Davis X. Machina: Comments like this contribute so much more to the conversation than snarky comments that are more discouraging than funny. Thanks for this.
eyelessgame
Denying someone their vote is exactly the same as awarding someone else two votes. It is exactly the same fraud.
And the irony is not lost on me that my comment comes right after WaterGirl’s more cogent comment. :) What Davis said – strategy for reversal is what we need to focus on. (If the above has any virtue, it is that it might help convince someone that reversal is needed.)
c u n d gulag
GOP POV – Acceptable voters:
White
Male
Born in the USA
Over 40
Married
Has children
Owns a car
Owns land
Owns a home
Owns Nigra’s
The wife can vote if she lets her husband fill-out her ballot.
All others cannot be proven to be REAL Murkin’s, and thus are not allowed to vote.
Davis X. Machina
@WaterGirl: The snark is closer to most of reality, most of the time.
Take the evil and the points. Evil doesn’t always win, but it always covers the spread.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@kay:
You can disprove it to the right audience. Not to the political extremists who are pushing this lie obviously, but to apolitical people I think it can be done, if and when we can get them to listen up and pay attention. Once that is accomplished, Kay, your posts are exactly what we need to fight this. But the hardest part is just getting the audience to pay attention to what is going on in the first place, which is why this..
..is so important. The Right has mastered the Leninist tactic of staging quiet coups involving the boring little administrative details that most people just aren’t interested in, but which give them levers of power.
I don’t know what the best solution to this is, but I’m guessing that we need to fight back with anecdotes which are emotionally moving and which take the boring mechanics that nobody wants to hear about and make them personal. The WW2 Vet that couldn’t vote yesterday, that sort of thing. We should be screaming from the rooftops about these individual incidents because they personalize an otherwise impersonal and boring process.
kay
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
It’s funny, because I passed a petition to put the Ohio law to a referendum, and it was right at the time we were repealing SB 5 (the union law). All of a sudden, I got all this cooperation on the voting rights issue, because people put two and two together: “we won’t be able to repeal SB 5 if we can’t vote!”
They saw the two things as connected.
Davis X. Machina
@kay: The swift death — or at least inanimation — of the Maine voter ID law, after the re-instatement of same-day registration, suggests that even state legislators aren’t so dim that they can’t make the connection too.
qwerty42
But … but … but … SEIU Thugs!!! … Teh Acornz!!! …soshuliszm!!! …
I think that covers the bases.
oops … 10th Amendment!!!
kideni
I was really happy to hear about this yesterday, but this being Wisconsin, I’m sure to get knocked back before long. The Republicans will, of course, appeal this, and depending on where they go (I’m not sure if this is one of those situations where they can shop around for a judge in a friendly district or not), they may succeed. Since the judge signed a recall petition, they’re ginning up outrage that he’s out to get Republicans (a state supreme court justice hearing arguments from a law firm that donated its services to him, and ruling in their favor more often than not? totally ok, how could you even think of calling him biased?; a circuit court justice making a ruling that’s clearly grounded in the constitution, on something that doesn’t affect him personally? totally biased because he signed a petition!).
Matt McIrvin
Slightly worse, actually, since in one case someone’s being denied the power of a fraction of 1/(N-1) of total votes cast, and in the other case the extra vote is 1/(N+1) of total votes cast, where N is the number of votes that would have existed without the irregularity. And the difference gets larger as the number of affected votes increases.
giltay
I was going to say that US elections law sickens me, but we Canadians don’t have much legitimacy on the matter at present. However, federal election law is consistent across all the provinces and territories and is handled by a single agency and if you didn’t get a registration card, you can register at the poll with government ID with your name and address, you can use government ID with your name and a bank statement or utility bill or if you don’t have those, you can use other forms of official ID, and if you don’t have any ID at all you can get a neighbour to swear an affidavit at the polling station so you can vote. How is this hard?
Also, we still manage to count ballots by hand.
(Note, the current meagre voting fraud investigations are about voter suppression: people receiving calls from someone impersonating an Elections Canada official redirecting them to nonexistent polls.)
supa
The best part of last night is that we finally got rid of that useless piece of shit and firebagger darling Kucinich. The best part is that his replacement is running against Joe the Plumber…..lol!
schrodinger's cat
@Matt McIrvin: Did you go the McMegan school of Math? How does a person not voting Democrat become a vote for a Republican? It decreases a vote for the Democrat by 1 and the total number of votes cast by 1.
m = # of votes for a Democrat
n=# of votes for a Republican
due to voter suppression lets say one voter for Democrats cannot vote, then m becomes m-1 and
total # of votes cast, become m+n-1.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@giltay:
If you take the wingnut argument at face value, every US election prior to the invention and widespread use of photo ID was potentially tainted with fraud. Abraham Lincoln in 1860? How do we know that those nefarious abolitionists weren’t cheating? Maybe the Confederates had a point after all.
Mnemosyne
Since everyone who votes has to first fill out a voter registration card where their ID is checked and the registration is sent to the state and verified, I don’t understand why the states can’t then mail you a Voter ID card based on that registration that you can bring to the poll. If you change your registration, they send you a new one.
That’s what’s so frustrating — if the real concern is that voters have an ID that they show at the polls, there are very easy ways to do that without making voters jump through extra hoops. Just goes to show that the real concern is not fraud.
Marked Hoosier
Why aren’t Republicans also pushing for ID’s for sitting on a jury? I just served on one, and never showed proof of identity, residency, or even citizenship.
WHAT ABOUT ALL THE CRIMINALS PUT ON THE STREET BY JURY FRAUD!!one!
/sarcasm
//probably shouldn’t even give them the idea
Zifnab
If Democrats want to be clever about this, they need to pivot on voter fraud by making the registration process both more easy and more secure.
Personally, I think the voter registration process is confusing and archaic. Why do I need to register to vote when I have a valid driver’s license that I can just hand over at the polls? Why do I need to register to vote when I’m already enrolled in school? Why would any government employee need to register to vote? The government already has all the person’s information.
Democrats need to press for automatic voter registration as a tool for combating voter fraud. Make voter registration automatic in everything from changing your address at the Post Office to paying your taxes. If you register for anything with the local, state, or federal government, it should automatically register you to vote. This seems like a no-brainer and one that even Republicans will have a difficult time not getting behind if you pitch it behind the GOP faux-concern trolling tone.
dollared
@supa: Great, one less liberal, pro worker, antiwar Democrat in the house. Awesome!
Kilkee
OT, but apparently 1st District Congresswoman Chellie Pingree has decided not to run for Olympia Snowe’s Senate seat. Almost certainly a result of former Governor Angus King (I) announcing that he’s getting into the race.
Martin
@giltay:
Actually, you do have a lot of legitimacy. First off, we don’t have a government ID because the government will track your movements and soçialism and mark of the beast. That’s half the problem right there.
The other bit of legitimacy you have is actually on the hand counting. Not that we should be necessarily be distrustful of the electronic ballots, but the way that you count in Canada is that the ballots and counts are certified at the polling place, and anyone is welcome to sit and observe, and representatives of each party are welcome to challenge the count on the spot.
In the US, that process gets delayed, and due to that delay votes now gain or lose importance. Florida 2000 voters weren’t any more or less important in the overall scheme until it was clear that their votes were the swing votes, and suddenly they took on an importance that no other votes in the country had. And that importance resulted in changes on-the-spot to how the elections where handled – the process changed mid-process. That wouldn’t happen in Canada because there’s no time between the disclosure of results and the certification to change the importance of the act – everyone is blind to the results, so the process is handled exactly the same way everywhere.
It’s a subtle distinction but has tremendous consequences on how people act. When you get information is sometime more important than what information you get. This is a classic example of that.
Davis X. Machina
@Zifnab: They’ll just pivot to Big-Brother-inflected fearmongering, involving the One Big Database that will permit FEMA to put in camps not already on the BATF gun-seizure lists…
Big government mistrust, and queasiness about their use and collection of data, isn’t necessarily unwarranted, or partisan.
Martin
@Kilkee: Fuuuuck. We’ve already got 2 Kings in the House. A 3rd in the Senate? There should be a rule – like the no-more-than-3-Bobs-allowed-in-a-meeting rule. It’s too hard to keep track of them all.
catclub
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Of course, the serious reality is most likely that everyone cheats,
(see LBJ: Means of Ascent), but as long as both sides are both cheating AND policing the other side, cheating is kept within ‘reasonable’ limits. [Minnesota probably has less cheating than LBJ’s Texas, but not none.]
It is when there is one party rule (Putin’s Russia) that the cheating becomes unseemly. I think Stalin had something to say about who counts the votes.
Davis X. Machina
@Kilkee: Too bad. King’s a besotted worshiper at the altar of the cult of the Entrepreneur — a real pro-business, low-tax, low-service low-regulation type.
LL Bean’s and International Paper and Bowater and Bath Iron Works and UNUM all luuurved his independenty ways — but Maine can and should be electing people to his left on economics. We’re an old, poor state — even if he’s reliable on social issues, I don’t trust King on the safety net.
dollared
Look at the comments to the link in the Cleveland paper on Kay’s prior post on Ohio voting issues.
This will never be repealed in Wisconsin. 85% of the population have driver’s licenses, so they don’t get why it’s problem for the others. The Republicans have won this battle.
And – this will get sent to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which has been duly purchased by the Kochs and Allen-Bradley.
There is a solution, which is administrative. Just send a voter ID card to all registered voters every year. If there is no picture, go to them and get a picture. Full employment!
But first you have to get control of the administrative apparatus.
rikyrah
GOOD news from Wisconsin indeed. yeah
Soonergrunt
@Soonergrunt (mobile): frack you, auto-correct!
PeakVT
@schrodinger’s cat: He’s trying to describe the general case, not the partisan effects. I don’t think he’s right, though. A victim of suppression loses 1/N amount of power, and a double voter gains 1/(N+1) power, for a total of 2/(N+1). A person not involved either gains (1/(N))/(N-1) from the suppression of somebody else, or loses (1/(N))/(N+1) from double voting by somebody else.
Anyway, describing the problem in general terms mostly shows that, unless N is very low, one needs have a good estimate of the likely vote differential before deciding whether voter fraud or suppression is worthwhile. With modern polling one can get that estimate without much problem.
supa
@dollared: Name one bill Kucinich has successfully passed in his entire time in office.
Good luck. Not sponsored where he just adds his name. One that he created.
Let me help you, there isn’t one. In fact Kucinich is probably, as a matter of record, the least productive congressman EVER! But hey, he says war is bad so that makes him your hero and the bestest congressman ever …..sigh! Never mind he cannot actually accomplish anything…the talks the talk and that’s all that matters to you. The stupid it burns.
Mnemosyne
@dollared:
This is why the anecdotes are useful, though — reminding people that Grandma doesn’t drive anymore, so how can she show a driver’s license at the poll? is one of the ways you can get them to see the point. It’s very, very common for elderly people to have to give up driving, so you can reach a large population that way.
And, frankly, focusing the anecdotes on the elderly non-drivers rather than the poor people who are more likely to be disenfranchised is probably more compelling for most of the people who are casually in favor of voter ID laws because they haven’t thought it through. Having people who were able to vote for 40 or 50 years suddenly be disenfranchised solely because of this new law is more compelling than hypotheticals.
giltay
@Martin: There could be enough fraud in the past election to put the legitimacy of the current Government in doubt.
By government ID, I mean a driver’s license, birth certificate, health insurance card, passport, Indian status card, Social Insurance Number card, firearms license, library card, etc etc. That is, any piece of ID issued by any Canadian government. Some of these cards don’t have photos, so you have to bring, like, a phone bill or a tax statement or something. There’s a whole document on what ID is required if anyone’s interested. Provincial and municipal elections are handled by their own agencies, but the rules are generally the same.
I have voted with a Scantron ballots in municipal elections, which were counted electronically, but the paper ballots were retained for recounts. I just don’t understand how, in a country with more than 10× the resources of Canada, it’s not possible to count 10× the ballots in one evening.
Ronzoni Rigatoni
Ol’ mom is 94 and cast her first ballot in 1940 for (who else?) FDR. She’s been a registered D for all this time, but no matter how many voter registration cards we presented, she still needed a “gummint-issued” photo ID card in order to get anything notarized here in FL, to prove that she was not an illegal immigrant. Her expired PA Driver license was not enough. Took us over 18 mos. to get all the required documents together, including her certified 1940 marriage certificate showing her name change. Fortunately we do not (yet) require photo ID’s to vote here. But that will change soon, I am sure.
PIGL
There is an open conspiracy to infringe or impede the right to vote by certain identifiable portions of the electorate. It is certainly coordinated across state lines.
The President should use the infinite powers of surveillance granted him by Congress to investigate, identify, charge, try and imprison for life all those involved. Or, I suppose he could just shoot them as I would do in his position, but he’s a better man than I, no doubt.