Republicans Still Trying to Rig Elections in Wisconsin, Citizens Be Damned

Republicans say: Not qualified to vote

Update: Authoring Judge in Landmark Case Disavows His Former Support for Voter ID (Schwartz. NYT)

Doug Chapin, Rick Hasen and the Washington Post note new Republican efforts to micromanage Wisconsin elections right down to the poll worker, and continuing efforts to obstruct voters.

Republican legislative efforts to manage which voters get to vote were deemed unconstitutional in ongoing legal, civil rights fights that will likely continue for years across the nation.

Civil actions continue in Wisconsin state and federal courts, including two consolidated federal cases slated for trial on November 4.

Republicans will of course stick to the James Sensenbrenner-Scott Walker-GOP BS line that photo voter IDs are "common sense" measures to prevent voter impersonation fraud, though the GOP is fully aware no that virtually no voter fraud exists out of the 100s of millions of votes cast.

And potentially 100,000s of Wisconsin citizens could be disenfranchised were Wisconsin's voter ID law made operative in a high-turnout election like that in November 2014. That's in Wisconsin alone.

Chaos, confusion, voter frustration, long lines and anger are the predictable results, with voter disenfranchisement as the objective.

A voter presents a GOP-approved ID, two election inspectors (poll workers) check it for photo resemblance, date and signature and these new qualifications to vote are met.

Oh, sorry Carol, longtime neighbor, you left your license at work: No vote for you!

The One Day Voter ID Was Used in Wisconsin

Let's take a look at the one day, February 14, 2012, in Wisconsin when registered, constitutionally qualified voters were forced to present photo voter IDs when walking up to the poll books before casting their vote.

On February 14, 2012, primary day in Wisconsin, there were no statewide elections; the Wisconsin Government Accountability Office did not estimate voter turn-out because of this fact and the related fact of very low voter-turnout that informed observers guessed was about four percent statewide.

Republicans present this four percent February 2012 primary election is having proceeded swimmingly, and therefore high turnout elections (say 60 percent) will by GOP logic be just fine.

Wrong and wrong.

Reposted from February 2012:

Update III: Madison voters turned away at polls for lacking photo ID. "She was fairly recently in a car accident and couldn't make it to the DOT to get a Wisconsin ID," said Melanie Sax, the chief elections inspector at the polling location at Trinity United Methodist Church on Vilas Avenue. The woman, who does not drive, has neither a driver's license nor a state ID.

That woman is Marge Curtin—disenfranchised.

Update II: 69-year old veteran Gil Paar was shocked when poll workers told him his photo I.D. from the V.A. wasn’t on the accepted list. ... “There’s a possibility that a veteran could have only this type of I.D., because he’s had a stroke, let’s say, up at the V.A. hospital. And because of that, he had his driver’s license taken away. So case in point, he would have only this Veterans Administration I.D. through the hospital.

“And they’re telling me I can’t use it, I couldn’t use it. this is not right. you’ve got a guy who serves, does his time in the Air Force, or Army or the Navy, and then he comes home and can’t vote? What the f—- did I go in for?” (Racine Jounral-Times)

Update: U.S. senators on Tuesday asked the Government Accountability Office to study what they called an "alarming number" of new state laws that will make it "significantly harder" for millions of eligible voters to cast ballots this November.

As an observer from the NAACP looked on, the 200-plus voters in one Fitchburg, Wisconsin voting district yesterday presented an electorate irritated with the GOP's new voter ID requirements.

Wisconsin's voter ID law was passed without any Democratic votes, and no dissenting Republican votes.

Rejected, per the new statute (Act 23), yesterday was an Army Reserve ID that did not include an expiration date.

Many comments from voters were made to election workers: Including "What's next, retina scans?" and "Here to pay my poll tax."

One woman who was inexplicably purged from the polls and tried to re-register objected to the voter registration process as too invasive.

Though the voter ID law, Republicans say, is intended to stop rampant voter impersonation at the polls, not one case of voter impersonation in Wisconsin has been prosecuted going back decades.

But Republicans remain optimistic they can stop enough Democratic-leaning citizens from voting to sway a close election, concentrating on suppressing college and tech students, the elderly and black voters in Milwaukee.

A research report by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment and Training Institute shows that over 177,000 elderly persons in Wisconsin aged 65 and older do not possess a driver's license or state photo identification.

Fed Appellate Judge Recants: We Blew Voter ID Opinion

Authoring Judge of Voter ID case recants

Republican Party Voter Obstruction Project Could Be Heading for Trainwreck

Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (1981-present) is a sitting justice who writes a column for Slate Magazine and regularly intones on the abundant rightwing, judicial idiocies of our time.

In an amazing, audacious and perhaps bizarre interview featuring Posner and Mike Sacks (Host/Producer with HuffPost Live) first reported by Rick Hasen, Posner has recanted his 2007 decision in Crawford heard before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and authored by Posner, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008.

 "The purpose of the Indiana law is to reduce voting fraud, and voting fraud impairs the right of legitimate voters to vote by diluting their votes," Judge Richard Posner wrote in his majority opinion in 2007, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in CRAWFORD v. MARION COUNTY ELECTION BD. (Nos. 07-21 and 07-25) (2008).

Posner has now publicly recanted his opinion.

The Brad Blog reports, "This is nothing less than remarkable. The 7th circuit court judge who wrote the majority opinion in the landmark Crawford v. Marion County Election Board case, has now admitted he got it wrong! 'I think we did not have enough information," Judge Richard Posner said in remarks today. "If the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.'"

Posner made his comments in an interview with Mike Sacks discussing jurisprudence and Posner's new book, Reflections on Judging (Harvard University Press, 2013).

Writes Hasen:

In response to Mike Sacks’s questions about whether Judge Posner and the 7th circuit got it wrong in Crawford case, the one upholding Indiana’s tough voter id law against constitutional challenge (Posner says):

'Yes. Absolutely. And the problem is that there hadn’t been that much activity with voter identification. And … maybe we should have been more imaginative… we…. weren’t really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disfranchise people entitled to vote. There was a dissenting judge, Judge Evans, since deceased, and I think he is right. But at the time I thought what we were doing was right. It is interesting that the majority opinion was written by Justice Stevens, who is very liberal, more liberal than I was or am ... But I think we did not have enough information. And of course it illustrates the basic problem that I emphasize in book. We judges and lawyers, we don’t know enough about the subject matters that we regulate, right? And that if the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.'

Here’s the quote from Posner’s book, which Mike Sacks flashed on the screen: 'I plead guilty to having written the majority opinion (affirmed by the Supreme Court} upholding Indiana’s requirement that prospective voters prove their identity with a photo id—a law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention.'

The repercussions for protecting voter rights of Americans against the Republican and Tea Party are stunning.

The whole nationwide Republican Party project of obstructing the voting of Americans could be in dire jeopardy.

This is because Crawford is the landmark case that, for example, the Wisconsin DoJ, Scott Walker and even the historically (and formerly) non-partisan Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau (and every other GOP state hack) have hyped (erroneously) as the controlling legal case on challenges to the GOP's photo voter-obstruction statutes.

The Crawford case was challenged as unconstitutional on its face, so no evidence was presented demonstrating how voters were obstructed.

This lack of the evidence will not be a problem in Wisconsin.

In Wisconsin, two federal challenges to the state Voter ID law are set to heard on November 4: Frank v. Walker, (Case 11cv1128), (U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin) and Jones et al v. Deininger et al (Case 2:12-cv-00185), (U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin).

There is a mountain of social scientific evidence accumulated in Wisconsin Courts in state cases and by the federal plaintiffs demonstrating how voters were intended by this GOP legislation and the practice of the legislation to be obstructed from voting.

Look for a federal decision finding that Act 23, Wisconsin's Photo Voter ID law, is discriminatory and not supported by valid neutral justifications.

Mike Sacks interview with Judge Richard A. Posner: