Senate Democrats blocked a final vote early Wednesday morning on a controversial bill that would require voters to present photo IDs at the polls.

Before pushing the bill to Senate chambers, Assembly Republicans voted last week against 50 proposed amendments. Republican Senators voted against another 25 amendments Tuesday night.

The Senate will reconvene Thursday morning to address the bill.

The legislation should make its way to Gov. Scott Walker’s desk as early as Friday, University of Wisconsin political science professor Barry Burden said.

Although the Senate will likely have the votes to make the bill become law, fervent opposition remains amongst Democrat members of the body.

“This bill will make Wisconsin the hardest state to vote in,” Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison, said. “This is about voter suppression, not just photo identification.”

Burden said the new restrictions that would be placed on voting requirements if the bill passes would be some of the harshest regulations in any state.

Only eight or nine states have passed photo ID legislation in the past two years, putting Wisconsin at the forefront of what could become a national precedent, Burden said.

“This will be one of the most restrictive laws in the country,” Burden said. “It is an extensive solution for a small problem and it’s missing the mark.”

Since late January when the bill was introduced, Republicans have argued the “mark” is voter fraud.

“Anyone who casts a vote deserves to have the full faith that their vote isn’t getting cancelled out by someone else’s fraud,” Sen. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said in a statement Tuesday.

Still, Risser said Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen worked for two years to find voter fraud in Wisconsin in an effort to validate the bill, but found none of the cases that prevailed would have been prevented under the restrictions in the voter ID bill.

In addition to requiring specific forms of photo ID, the bill would increase the minimum residency requirement from 10 to 28 days.The increase would disenfranchise many students from voting in September primary elections, Risser said.

Democrats also criticized the GOP for spending money on enforcing voter ID while making widespread budget cuts to address the state deficit.

“The GOP is spending $7 million on three cases of voter fraud,” Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, said. “[This comes] at a time when they claim the state is broke-it seems interesting they are willing to increase what Wisconsin spends on elections by 40 percent.”

The upper bound of the cost is $7.5 million with some caveats, said Paul Onsager, who helped prepare the Legislative Fiscal Bureau’s report on the bill.

Fitzgerald’s spokesperson Andrew Welhouse said the cost that goes along with the bill would be closer to $2 million. The reconciliation for the cost is ensuring that the bill does not create an unconstitutional poll tax by requiring voters to purchase photo IDs, he said.

But Larson said he thinks the bill could still be classified as unconstitutional. Senate Democrats have criticized the bill’s constitutionality, arguing it would confuse the public and make it more difficult for minorities to cast votes.

“This will lead to a court challenge under the Voter Rights Act,” Larson said.