The Wisconsin State Assembly Thursday voted 64-33 in favor of AB 63, a bill proposing all voters must present photo identification when voting at election polls.

State Rep. Jeff Stone, R-Greendale, introduced the legislation to restore integrity in the election process and reduce voter fraud.

“The majority of the people in the state agree that this will help reform our broken election system,” Stone said in a release.

The bill gained bipartisan support in the Assembly and will go to the State Senate next. If passed, Gov. Jim Doyle will vote on the proposed legislation.

Doyle vetoed a similar bill in 2003, expressing concern over requiring individuals to present a photo ID at election polls because he believes it would restrict people from voting.

“Many [people], particularly the elderly and poor, lack photo ID, and these people shouldn’t be denied the right to vote,” Doyle spokesperson Melanie Fonder said. “We want more people to vote, not fewer.”

The bill would make Wisconsin one of two states to have the most restrictive version of this law in the nation, next to South Carolina, Fonder said.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin also disapproves of the Voter ID Bill. In particular, they believe it might violate the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits taking actions that will disproportionately affect minorities, according to Larry Dupuis, legal director of the Wisconsin ACLU branch.

Stone and other supporters of the Voter ID Bill want to prevent incidents like those that happened in Milwaukee last year, when a large number of suspected voter-fraud cases occurred during the presidential election.

Dupuis, who worked as a bipartisan poll monitor, does not believe voter fraud is a widespread problem.

“We saw no indication of voter fraud,” Dupuis said. “We saw the opposite tendency of under-resourced and poorly trained

The poll workers could not process voters in time and sometimes wrongly sent people home, especially students, Dupuis said.

Libertarian Party of Wisconsin Chair Ed Thompson believes that although fraud may be a problem, requiring people to carry identification will not solve the problems anyway.

“I think we have enough regulation in place — if everyone would do their job correctly, I don’t think we need more government intervention,” Thompson said.

Still, the majority of the Assembly hopes Doyle will change his mind and support the bill if it passes through the Senate.

“As elected officials, we must do everything possible to make it easier to vote and tougher to cheat,” Joe Leibham, R-Sheboygan, said in a release. “This legislation puts reasonable safeguards in place to do that while serving to restore integrity and confidence in Wisconsin’s electoral process.”