The challenge is One Wisconsin Inst., Inc. v. Nichol, (2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 107781).
One Wisconsin v. Nichol was advanced in a December 2015 ruling by U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson who rejected a motion to dismiss by members and staff of the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board acting in their titular capacity.
Concluded Judge Nichol in his December 2015 opinion, " ... it is also true that when a state regulation subjects voters' rights 'to 'severe' restrictions, the regulation must be narrowly drawn to advance a state interest of compelling importance.' Id. at 434 (internal citations and quotation marks omitted). As defendants concede in their reply, the Equal Protection Clause is the mechanism through which to guard against such impermissible restrictions."
Today, One Wisconsin Now announced a new filing detailing severe state restrictions to voting, restrictions that destroy the right to vote of Wisconsin citizens.
The filing concerns Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles stopping or severely impeding Wisconsin voters from obtaining the necessary photo voter ID that is a precondition to vote.
This filing describes the consequences warned about by voting rights activists when the Scott Walker's administration in 2011 instructed the Wisconsin Department of Transportation head to direct DMV employees "to refrain from actively informing the public about the ability to receive a free identification card for the purposes of voting," (Nichols, The Capital Times).
An injunction motion after Wisconsin's April 5 presidential primary appears likely.
The One Wisconsin Now press release is reproduced below:
New Filing in Voter Rights Lawsuit Exposes Serious Flaws at DMV Providing Voters With IDs,
Erroneous Denials and Bureaucratic Bumbling Taking the Franchise Away From Legal Voters
Madison, Wisconsin — A new filing in a lawsuit brought by One Wisconsin Institute and other voter rights advocates exposes serious flaws at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in the process for providing Wisconsinites with the ID that voters must now produce to cast their ballot at the polls. As part of the voter ID law adopted by Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican controlled legislature, individuals are ostensibly able to request a free identification card from the DMV under certain circumstances. But bureaucratic delays and improper denials are preventing otherwise legal voters from obtaining the ID now required to vote.
“There has been a comprehensive, systematic effort in Wisconsin to make voting harder and more complicated for targeted populations by Republican politicians attempting to gain an unfair partisan advantage,” said Scot Ross, One Wisconsin Institute Executive Director. “The documented failures of the DMV to provide legal voters with the ID they now need to exercise their right to vote is yet another sad episode in the assault on democracy underway in Wisconsin.”
The suit, filed in federal court in Madison, outlines more than a dozen policies that have made voting in Wisconsin more challenging for eligible citizens and seeks to strike down various restrictive voting measures put in place by Governor Scott Walker and the Republican State Legislature since 2011.
The latest filing by the plaintiffs notes that in the state voter ID case, the state supreme court held that the DMV had to exercise its discretion under the “extraordinary proof” petition process to permit voters to obtain exemptions for having to pay for birth certificates or other government records needed to obtain voter ID. An analysis of this process and numerous examples shows how this process is resulting in otherwise legal voters being denied the opportunity to exercise their right to vote.
An internal DMV analysis found an error rate of 27 percent, meaning more than one in four petitions to obtain a voter ID under the extraordinary proof process were mishandled between March and August of 2015. The agency admits numerous instances of petitions being suspended because a person gave up in anger or frustration.
And the problem is expected to get worse. The DMV is expecting increased demand for voter IDs this year due to the presidential election and already reports a backlog of dozens of “open” petitions, has cut back on staff, and has no extra staff or budget allocated to deal with the expected increased demand.
The filing includes several examples of how the DMV process is broken, resulting in eligible individuals being denied IDs, and therefore their right to vote, including:
- Refusing to provide an ID to a woman who had lost the use of her hands and couldn’t sign an application. The woman brought her daughter with her to sign the application and even provided her daughter with power of attorney giving her permission to sign, but the DMV did not allow it;
- Denying the petitions of many eligible voters because of minor discrepancies in the spelling of their names or uncertainties about their exact dates of birth—even though DMV acknowledges it has no doubts these disenfranchised voters are U.S. citizens;
- “Turning away” a senior citizen who had been ‘born in a concentration camp in Germany,’ and his German birth certificate had been lost in a fire. That citizen was ultimately granted an ID, but only after extraordinary effort on his behalf to comply with absurd demands by the DMV.
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