Voter ID Law Struck Down, Exposed Again As GOP Scheme to Obstruct Voters

Update: See also Exorcising the Voter Fraud Ghost (Hasen, Reuters), and A Federal Judge Searches for Voter Fraud in Wisconsin and Finds None (Cohen, The Atlantic), GOP’s Voter ID Sham Shot Down: Why a Federal Court Said No Way (Friedman, Salon), and Voter I.D. Is the Real Fraud (New York Times editorial, April 29, 2014).

It didn't take long for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (Rochester, Wisconsin) and Scott Walker's office to declare their intentions to call a special session of the legislature to "do whatever it takes to ensure voter ID is in place as quickly as possible," in Vos' words to stop voter fraud.

This is of course a lie; there is no in-person voter fraud in Wisconsin and the media ought to report this fact. 

When Republicans assert voter fraud, they should be held accountable in the news against facts.

The real story is: Republicans are lying and trying relentlessly to stop legal voters from voting. This is an affront to democracy.

Fortunately for Wisconsin, the GOP's obstructive scheme of voter ID, Act 23, is stopped dead in its tracks.

These two cases Judge Lynn Adelman ruled on will take years to get to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the mean time, the GOP should be held accountable, and its efforts to obstruct the vote of Wisconsin citizens should be reported on and condemned.

From Wisconsin Federal District Judge Lynn Adelman's opinion:

"The evidence introduced by the plaintiffs confirms that voter-impersonation fraud does not occur in Wisconsin. The plaintiffs offered the testimony of Lorraine Minnite, a professor at Rutgers University who specializes in the study of the incidence of voter fraud in contemporary American elections. Professor Minnite studied elections in Wisconsin during the years 2004, 2008, 2010 and 2012 to determine whether she could identify any incidents of voter fraud. She consulted a variety of sources of information, including newspaper databases, news releases by the Wisconsin Attorney General, criminal complaints, decisions by state courts, and documents issued by the GAB. From these sources, Minnite was able to identify only one case of voter-impersonation fraud. Tr. 1036–42. And the single case of voter-impersonation fraud did not involve in-person voter impersonation. Rather, that case involved a man who applied for and cast his recently deceased wife’s absentee ballot. Tr. 1041. Thus, from Minnite’s work, it appears that there have been zero incidents of in-person voter-impersonation fraud in Wisconsin during recent elections."