Earlier today, Scott Walker tweeted what is, apparently, his justification of the passage of the Voter ID Bill (which he just signed into law). The tweet reads:
"4,462,007 people in Wisconsin have drivers licenses or state-issued ID cards. There are 3,499,582 registered voters in Wisconsin."
Frustratingly, and not surprisingly, there are no data associated with this tweet (I suppose there's not much you can do with only 140 characters). I set out to find out the source of his data. I did manage to find the Government Accountability Board's "Elections and Voting Statistics" page, which links to the State of Wisconsin's Registered Voters by Congressional District totals following the 2010 elections. They list a total of 3,493,306 registered voters, which corresponds exactly to Walker's information.
I was not able to track down Walker's data concerning the number of Wisconsinites with driver's licenses or State-issued ID cards. The Wisconsin Department of Transportation does have statistics regarding numbers of drivers as licensed by county. The most recent stats available show that in 2009, there were 3,975,607 people with valid Wisconsin driver's licenses (that excludes people with expired, suspended, or withdrawn licenses), which does not correspond with Walker's numbers. As far as holders of state-issued IDs, in 2009 there were 473,187 people holding Wisconsin ID's. That, added to the number of people with driver's licenses gives a total of 4,448,794. So I cannot figure out exactly where he got this number, but he is in the ballpark.
Walker's tweet implies, therefore, that since the number of people with valid driver's licenses exceeds the number of people registered to vote, then voila! No problem, because apparently everyone who is registered to vote must already have a driver's license, right?
Wrong.
First of all, the number of valid driver's licenses issued by Wisconsin is not necessarily correlated to the number of people living in the State of Wisconsin now. After I moved to Wisconsin years ago, I still had a valid Pennsylvania driver's license, that was probably good for years. There are people who may have moved out of state and neglected to notify the DMV (!). Additionally, there has been a steady influx of residents to Wisconsin, even since 2008, some of whom may not have voted in an election yet and therefore have not yet registered as voters. There may be people with valid licenses who are now deceased. And there are certainly licensed drivers who are under age 18 and therefore are not eligible to vote yet. The numbers of licensed drivers in Wisconsin does not take any of that into account.
The numbers offered by Walker also do not take into account the possibility that more people will want to vote in the future than have in the last election. There may well be Wisconsinites who have not voted in prior elections, for whatever reasons, even though they are eligible.
Finally, the new Voter ID Bill will require that the driver's license or state-issued ID have the resident's current address. I cannot even begin to guess how many people have valid driver's licenses that have old addresses listed. Not many people bother to go to the DMV every time they move, especially those people who do not own homes, are students, move frequently, or have less secure financial situations.
Because of this new Voter ID Bill, the most important issue right now is whether the people that are eligible to vote have driver's licenses or state-issued ID cards that meet the requirements of the Bill. The issue is not what the latest numbers of valid licenses and registered voters are. Those numbers are flawed and do not reflect the reality of who is eligible to vote by virtue of their age, citizenship, and lack of felony conviction. The heart of the matter is whether those people who want to vote (and can) will be able to vote given the new restrictions.
An excellent blog entitled "Potential Voter Disenfranchisement," written by Eric Compas, Assistant Professor in the Geography and Geology Department at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and republished in Defend Wisconsin shows exactly what is wrong with the Bill and Scott Walker's logic. The author shows clearly, by county, the discrepancies between Walker's "valid licensed drivers" and "registered voters."
As it turns out, the author notes four counties at high risk for voter disenfranchisement - those with more current registered voters than people with driver's licenses (and remember that this is not taking into account people with licenses that will be invalid because of an old address). Those counties are Milwaukee, Dane (the home of Madison), Ozaukee (just north of Milwaukee County) and Door. As the author notes:
"The total voters without drivers licenses within these counties, 20,162 voters, is well within the margin of recent elections. The largest numbers are from Dane and Milwaukee Counties which have traditionally voted heavily for the Democrats."
And again, I have to emphasize that the Voter ID Bill requires a license with a current address. That alone will lead to disenfranchisement. Some counties in Wisconsin have DMV offices that are virtually impossible to visit for a working person. The DMV in Door County, in Northern Wisconsin, is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Florence county DMV is open 9:15 A.M. to 3:15 P.M. - on the fourth Thursday of the month. Menominee county doesn't even have its own DMV office. You can drive to neighboring Oconto county, however, between 7:45 A.M. and 4:30 P.M. on the second Wednesday of the month. And none of these offices are open on weekends. Good luck to rural folks, farmers, or working people throughout the state in getting a new, valid driver's license with a current address.
Once again, Scott Walker either indicates his lack of intelligence and lack of comprehension of a complex issue, or shows how little he cares about the voices of the people of Wisconsin. He and the Republican State Senators and Assembly members have done a huge disservice to the people of this state. Their motive is all too transparent.
