Voting is sort of like donating blood: people who don’t do it always have to find a good excuse why not. The non-voting among us will be relieved to know that, thanks to the Wisconsin Legislature and Scott Walker, they will soon have another good reason not to vote.
Namely, the Wisconsin Voter Identification Act, a bill currently being rushed through the Assembly and Senate. If passed, the law would require all voters to show a valid Wisconsin driver’s license with one’s current address, a state ID or a military ID. It sounds simple, but in fact these new rules will be a significant challenge for college students and other young people who relocate frequently.
Busy students who move every 8-12 months are disproportionately burdened by the law compared to older Wisconsinites who are more settled. Minorities will also face greater challenges, as they are much less likely to have a valid drivers license than Whites in Wisconsin. It will also be a challenge for rural citizens to renew their IDs: three Wisconsin counties don’t even have a DMV site, many rural DMV offices are open one day a month or less and only one Wisconsin DMV has weekend hours.
Supporters of the law claim that there is widespread voter fraud in Wisconsin, and that this measure is needed to prevent illegal voting. Others argue that since you need an ID to do virtually everything else in life, it is only common sense that one should be required for voting as well. But they are wrong on all counts.
Claims of widespread voter fraud rely mostly on circumstantial evidence comparing voter registration rolls to other public records looking for irregularities. And there are irregularities, not because there’s fraud, but because typographic errors are understandably common when nearly three million handwritten addresses, birthrates and names are entered into the computer. New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice investigated voter irregularities in Wisconsin and found that the vast majority were due to errors rather than wrongdoing. They found the actual rate of illegal voting in Wisconsin was 0.0006 percent.
A highly critical report put together by the Milwaukee Police Department found that voter fraud was theoretically possible, but failed to find compelling evidence that it actually happened in the 2004 election, though their report has been cited over and over as evidence of rampant corruption in our state. But in fact, after a year and a half of investigation, the only definite thing the Task Force had to show for itself was a “belie[f] that fraud was committed.”
The law’s proponents also argue requiring ID at the polls will prevent illegal voting. However, the Justice Center’s report found that none of the (very few) instances of voter fraud could have been prevented by requiring IDs. Likewise, the MPD report found no definite proof that double-voting (the kind of voter fraud that the Voter ID act is meant to prevent) occurred in 2004.
Other supporters ask: Why, if you need an ID to get on an airplane, rent a movie and buy Sudafed, shouldn’t you need one to vote? Because getting a Blockbuster card is a privilege whereas voting is a right guaranteed to all adult American citizens by the Constitution.
If we’re going to build barriers to the exercise of constitutional rights, it should be done as narrowly as possible and for a good reason. The Voter Identification Act satisfies neither of these tests. It is a massive sledge hammer swung clumsily at an imaginary nail. It is an ineffective solution to a non-existent problem that will have a chilling effect on the exercise of voting rights.
So why is it being fast-tracked through the legislature? A cynical person might think back to a claim made by the former head of the Republican Party of Texas. He said that a voter ID law in that state would give his party an extra 3 percent edge in the polls. Perhaps his brethren in our state are hoping for a similar gain. What other motivation could lead the ostensibly anti-regulatory majority party to rush such stringent new rules into law?
The Voter Rights Act is nothing more than a modern day poll tax. It deliberately disenfranchises students by disallowing student IDs and out-of-state drivers licenses. It also places a disproportionate burden on African-American and Hispanic Wisconsinites who are less likely than their white peers to have drivers licenses.
If Republicans want to guarantee their electoral supremacy in the state, that’s fine. But they should do so by having better policies, not by blocking others from exercising their constitutional rights.
Geoff Jara-Almonte ([email protected]) is a fourth-year medical student going into emergency medicine.
