In July, Wisconsin voters will start heading to the polls for a series of elections to recall several of the GOP state senators who voted to bust the state’s public employee unions. But the Wisconsin GOP, true to form, has a sneaky plan: they’re trying to change the voting rules to prevent many college students, senior citizens and others without official state IDs from casting votes in the recall election.
Wisconsin’s Voter ID bill, which if passed will kick in just before the recall elections, is one of 22 similar state-level bills currently in the works. Think Progress summarizes Wisconsin’s bill:
Wisconsin’s bill requires voters to use a driver’s license, state ID, military ID, passport, naturalization papers or tribal ID at the polls. Though student IDs are technically permitted, none of the colleges or universities in the state currently use IDs that meet the requirements listed in the bill. And as state Sen. Bob Jauch (D) notes, 175,000 seniors (70 percent of whom are women) do not have driver’s licenses and may have to “get a ride at least 50 miles round trip to obtain an identification card to enable them to continue their constitutional right to vote.” What’s more, the bill will cost the state more than $5.7 million to implement — at a time when Gov. Scott Walker (R) is claiming the state is broke and needs to restrict public employees’ collective bargaining rights to survive.
I can’t imagine that attempting to disenfranchise thousands of voters will do much to endear these lawmakers to Wisconsin’s citizens…but that won’t really matter if they can prevent enough people from casting votes.