Wisconsin’s voter ID law imposes the equivalent of a poll tax on individuals with out-of-state drivers licenses and discriminates against the poor, students and the elderly, according to a federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday.
ACLU lawyers argue in a 54-page lawsuit that the law “imposes a severe and undue burden on the fundamental right to vote under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution; violates the Twenty-Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution as an unconstitutional poll tax; and violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in arbitrarily refusing to accept certain identification documents.”
The suit argues that the law would force individuals to “choose between surrendering their driving privileges to obtain a free Wisconsin state ID card, paying a fee for a Wisconsin driver’s license, or losing their right to vote.” They argue that the requirement to surrender an out-of-state driver’s license “constitutes a material requirement imposed on an eligible voter who refuses to forfeit his/her right to vote without paying an unconstitutional poll tax.”
Notably, Wisconsin is not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act which requires certain states to get changes to their voting laws pre-cleared by the Justice Department.
In making their case, the ACLU gathered 17 voters — from a 84-year-old woman without a certified birth certificate to a 52-year-old homeless Army veteran to a 20-year old without a Social Security card to a 19-year-old college student who doesn’t want to give up his California driver’s license — to demonstrate the effect the law could have.
The suit comes ahead of Attorney General Eric Holder’s speech on protecting access to the polls.
Ryan J. Reilly
Ryan J. Reilly is a D.C.-based reporter for TPM. Prior to joining TPM, he worked for a news website covering the Justice Department and was a researcher for Bloomberg News. His email address is ryan(at)talkingpointsmemo.com.
AR 1998 A contractor with ACORN-affiliated Project Vote was arrested for falsifying about 400 voter registration cards.CO2005Two ex-ACORN employees were convicted in Denver of perjury for submitting false voter registrations. . 2004 An ACORN employee admitted to forging signatures and registering three of her friends to vote 40 times. . CT 2008 The New York Post reported that ACORN submitted a voter registration card for a 7-year-old Bridgeport girl. Another 8,000 cards from the same city will be scrutinized for possible fraud. . FL 2009 In September, 11 ACORN workers were accused of forging voter registration applications in Miami-Dade County during the last election. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the state attorney’s office scoured hundreds of suspicious applications provided by ACORN and found 197 of 260 contained personal ID information that did not match any living person. . 2008 Election officials in Brevard County have given prosecutors more than 23 suspect registrations from ACORN. The state's Division of Elections is also investigating complaints in Orange and Broward Counties. . 2004 A Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokesman said ACORN was “singled out” among suspected voter registration groups for a 2004 wage initiative because it was “the common thread” in the agency’s fraud investigations. . IN 2008 Election officials in Indiana have thrown out more than 4,000 ACORN-submitted voter registrations after finding they had identical handwriting and included the names of many deceased Indianans, and even the name of a fast food restaurant.MI2008Clerks in Detroit found a "sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent [voter] applications" from the Michigan branch of ACORN. Those applications have been turned over to the U.S. Attorney's office for investigation. . 2004 The Detroit Free Press reported that “overzealous or unscrupulous campaign workers in several Michigan counties are under investigation for voter-registration fraud, suspected of attempting to register nonexistent people or forging applications for already-registered voters.” ACORN-affiliate Project Vote was one of two groups suspected of turning in the documents. . MO 2008 Nearly 400 ACORN-submitted registrations in Kansas City have been rejected due to duplication or fake information.2007Four ACORN employees were indicted in Kansas City for charges including identity theft and filing false registrations during the 2006 election. . 2006 Eight ACORN employees in St. Louis were indicted on federal election fraud charges. Each of the eight faces up to five years in prison for forging signatures and submitting false information.2003Of 5,379 voter registration cards ACORN submitted in St. Louis, only 2,013 of those appeared to be valid. At least 1,000 are believed to be attempts to register voters illegally.
The list just goes on and on.... Liberals MUST cheat to win. It’s all they’ve got. “Absentee ballots are now the weapon of choice for people who want to commit voter fraud,” said Hans von Spakousky, a former Justice Department attorney who monitored voter fraud. It's the lowlife way.
Sure the far right will be bouncing off walls and wailing about massive voter fraud,
Well, exactly how many people have been convicted of voter fraud in the last 5,10,20 years?
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-as...
Here's some good information other than what is on the ACLU thinks they'll try and do.
William F Frahm II Its gotta be good if you can fit it on a bumper sticker.
Interesting that the ACLU wants to sue, but if you look at any union vote for positions you have to present your ID and union card to vote. Sounds a little hypocritical.
William F Frahm II
Bad analogy......the right to vote is a Constitutional right and not comparable to union rules.
William F Frahm II False equivalency is all you got, kiddo
This plus imminent recall plus Fed John Doe suit has me imagining this dull-eyed fuckwit within a few months tanking scotch and talking to paintings of Lincoln at 3 in the morning
Well, duuuuhhh . . . . . . it IS the intention of the GOP-baggers to block unlikely Republican votes, isn't it ? ?
Where is the evidence that there is voter fraud?
Mary Kathryn Mckay-Smalley
You'll find voter fraud when you discover you have to pay costly fees to get photo ID acceptable to the Republican majority...........even a ten dollar cost could mean reducing a very skimpy food budget. Poor people may have to walk miles or hitch hike to a voting location in brutally cold weather......the poor ususally vote democratic...............A person from either Michigan or Minnesota, ( can't remember which) she had voted every year since 1948 and had to cough up $200.00 for the privilege......other efforts are blocking early voting, and moving the voting booth to Oatmeal, Alabama.
llittle111Mary Kathryn Mckay-Smalley I think she is asking "where is the voter fraud (supposed)" which is the supposed reason why Walker et. al. think (!) that we need more stringent voter ID laws.
There is little if any evidence of voter fraud, nationally. There is, however, quite a bit of evidence for ELECTION fraud (e.g. Florida in 2000).
“He's worse than Hitler. Like, if Hitler fucked Hitler and had a baby, that wouldbe Scott Walker.”~ an anonymous user on Scott Walker (Hitler)
Liberals Rules In retrospect, if you think of it, there are only two people within the past 100 years that have ever had symbols, Hitler and Obama. Look it up.
WTF?
emjayay This must be a meme circulating through the right-wing racist nutcase websites right now. They glom onto shit like this in their naive, credulous way as though it were some magic incantation to finally prove that Obama is some antiChrist or evil villain. They're really pathetically small human beings that think this way.
William F Frahm IILiberals Rules Prince when he was in contract dispute with Sony over artistic control and the use of his name. Oh! My! Gaud! Obama is as insideous, nepharious and unwhite as Prince. Now, i can't tell if it's Prince or Obama who is the anti-Christ!
As an election judge, we have the right to allow someone to vote if someone knows them and swears to the fact. This nonsense just makes it harder for seniors to vote. They do not all drive and do not always keep up on the laws. I, for one. will give them a ballot if they have a voters card and another form of ID. Many of them still pay taxes and support the communities they live in. To deny them a ballot is un-American.
CorrectionCaroline M. Corman , to deny the eldely, the infirm, new arrivals, and lower class voters a ballot is, wait for it . . . .
. . . . . . . . . Republican.
Caroline M. Corman Caroline, not all states allow election judges to waive the ID requirement. For instance, here in PA, while the judge has always had the right to ask for ID, it was only required the first time a citizen voted in a new polling place. Under the voter suppression law currently proposed in the PA Senate, however, poll workers would require an ID every time a citizen attempted to vote - even if the poll worker has known the voter for years. If the voter cannot produce such ID - regardless of whether the poll worker knows the voter or not - the voter either cannot vote or must enter a provisional ballot (which are usually worthless, since the voter must show up somewhere with the ID they don't have within six days).
WalterCaroline M. Corman In MN, all you need is a bill addressed to you or a neighbor to vouch for you. Of course, the Republican'ts are trying to change that with a constitutional amendment, because, ZOMG, THE BROWN PEOPLE ARE VOTING TOO DAMN MUCH!!!!!!!!
If non-citizens were voting for Republicans you could bet your last dollar that democrats would be screaming for VOTER ID LAWS faster than Obama tells a lie.
dugfmjamul
That sounds like a guilty plea to GOP voter suppression...
BuckeyeBob You sound like a seditious progressive that supports the democrats efforts to institutionalized voter fraud by not requiring proof of citizenship requirements.
dugfmjamul SQUIRREL!!
dugfmjamul You keep talking about voter fraud, yet every time they do an investigation, they come up with almost nothing. .001% of votes may be fraudulent. That's hardly problematic enough to force people to have ID's. Go troll somewhere else. Why are you even on this site in the first place? Do you honestly have nothing better to do?
tn678 Really where is your evidence of .001%?
dugfmjamulBuckeyeBob But there is zero proof of "voter fraud" institutionalized by the Democrats. However, there is ample evidence in multiple states to support institutionalized voter fraud by the Republicans.
Kevin Schmidt I guess over 4,000 that voted in Colorado in 2010 because the Democrats voted against proof citizenship requirements is 'zero proof' to you?
dugfmjamul I see your accusation, but where is the proof?
Kevin Schmidt Where is your evidence of .001%?
I already provided the proof, just scroll down over all of those ad-homins by your immature little democrats and you can find them.
dugfmjamul I never made that claim.
Speaking of ad hominems, which is the correct way to spell it, I see several of yours. In fact, you actually posted the first one in this thread.
Kevin Schmidt That's a lie, I never draw First Blood. And I don't care if you made the claim or you buddy did and since you are cut from the same mold you can answer the question.
Forget all of that I just read all of your ad-homins to me before I even address you, so you can just POUND SAND and call it day.
dugfmjamul You are an extremely violent person, especially since you want to throw people off of 100 story sky scrapers. That's not an ad hominem, that's the truth. Plus after telling you how to spell the word, you still get it wrong. You must also be illiterate.
dugfmjamul Still waiting for your proof that 4,000 undocumented immigrants voted in Colorado in 2010. You must still be busy posting violent comments.
dugfmjamul Where is your evidence of ANY fraud at all? You don't have any. GB investigated 200+ cases and got convictions on 3.
dugfmjamulKevin Schmidt You call Democrats immature, but here you are on a liberal website fighting with people. Get a life.
dugfmjamul I'm sorry... I am trying to image an immigrant (legal or not) voting republican... nah.
dugfmjamulKevin Schmidt If your proof is cited somewhere below, it's been drowned out by your sophomoric insults and content-free banter. If you have proof, repost it here. Shouldn't be hard.
I'm assuming you are talking about the Colorado study that found as many 11,805 non-citizens in the CO voter registration rolls (out of a state with 3.3M registered voters ...) and suspected that 4,947 of them (of 1,828,323) actually voted. The problems with this are:
1. 5k/1.8M is 0.28%. That's a very low percentage of voters, even if heavily concentrated.
2. The "evidence" here is that these voters used non-citizen id to obtain their drivers' license. That is, they didn't use a registered birth certificate or naturalization papers. A large number of legal citizens get their driver's licenses using identification other than their birth certificates; this doesn't indicate that they are non-citizens, just that they had easier access to an alternate form of ID when they went in to get said license.
3. The fact that someone was not a citizen when they got a drivers license 10 years ago doesn't mean that they are still not a citizen now.
4. Most importantly, REQUIRING ID AT THE POLLING PLACE WOULD NOT SOLVE THIS PROBLEM!!!
All of these important facts were pointed out at the time of the report, and are why the Republican Secretary of State (Gessler) is not moving forward with legal action on any of the 4,947 suspected cases of FELONY voter fraud. There is simply no evidence, just potential. Gessler's not looking to fix the "problem" by identifying the responsible parties and prosecuting them. He wants a FUD stick to use to push his completely unrelated voter-disenfranchisement efforts forward. Thanks to alert citizens like yourself, Dug, that's exactly what he got.
Sigh. Feels like talking to a brick wall. That doesn't quite speak English.
Where's your evidence that there is voter fraud?dugfmjamul tn678
tn678 Really where is your evidence of .001% and GB investigated 200+ cases and got convictions on 3? Where is it?
tn678 You need to get some evidence and GET BACK TO ME!
Jet TredmontdugfmjamulKevin Schmidt Great explanation. Dug will keep pushing his bogus '4,000 in Colorado' crap. Facts don't deter these people. But, it's a great response.
By the way, the probable reason for a lot of those people not using a birth certificate, in spite of being US citizens, is that they simply never had one. Not everyone was born in a hospital.
dugfmjamulBuckeyeBob Idiot still using a word he doesn't know the meaning of. Yet he still preens like he thinks he's the smartest guy here. He's a living example of the Dunning-Kruger effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruge.... Basically, the troll's too stupid to know how stupid it is.
BuckeyeBobdugfmjamul Republican friends of mine have inadvertently done the same thing. I assume not intending to admit to trying to steal elections, they justify it on the grounds Democrats once did something.
webcelt If you are talking about 'two wrongs don't make it right' that would be something most Republicans would say and Democrats would actually do.
dugfmjamul If it actually happened, I'd want something done about it. But, I don't want the laws changed and voting to become more difficult as a response to an imaginary problem or a 'what if' that a consortium of right-wing billionaires and propagandists are trumpeting for their own political gain.
And for you to accuse Obama of lying doesn't carry a lot of weight, considering that you wouldn't know truth if it jumped up and bit you on the ass.
FawkesFOX Amazing, I have been telling you the truth the whole day while your side has been lying thru their teeth. The truth did bit you and it was called 'DugFmjamul'.
Obama has told so many lies since he as been in office that it takes professionals to keep up with all of them, but I'm sure you are going to be hear lots and lots of the lies Obama told during the debates no matter who the nominee is.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/12/indiana...
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