In a 44-page ruling issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman extended voting rights to citizens of Wisconsin previously disenfranchised because they have had difficulty in acquiring the right kind of ID to meet state standards for casting a ballot. This will not affect the state’s August 9 primary, only the general election in November. Wisconsin’s voter ID law, passed in 2011, is one of the strictest in the nation.
Consequent to the ruling, voters without acceptable ID will still be able to cast ballots by signing an affidavit explaining why they couldn’t obtain ID. Then they will be given a provisional ballot.
Ari Berman, whose excellent book Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America was published last August, writes at The Nation:
Nine percent of registered voters in Wisconsin, 9 percent of the electorate, lacked a government-issued ID when the law was passed. “Although most voters in Wisconsin either possess qualifying ID or can easily obtain one, a safety net is needed for those voters who cannot obtain qualifying ID with reasonable effort,” wrote Judge Lynn Adelman. “Because there are likely thousands of eligible voters in Wisconsin who lack qualifying ID, it is virtually self-evident that some of them will either need to exercise extraordinary effort to obtain qualifying ID or be unable to obtain ID no matter how hard they try.” [...]
This is a significant ruling against a bad law. Because a panel of Republican judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the law in 2014, the lower court could only soften the rough edges. (The voter-ID law and other restrictions, such as cutting early voting and making it harder to register to vote, are being challenged in a separate federal trial, with a ruling expected soon.)
The idea that it’s easy to obtain identification acceptable at the polls—and that people who object to strict voter ID laws are merely partisan whiners—is bogus. Infuriating examples abound of people who couldn’t afford the cost of documenting their bona fides, or found wending their way through the bureaucracy daunting.
Many advocates of these strict laws keep their lips zipped about the real motivations for imposing these laws. But enough of them have slipped up and given away the game, saying or implying publicly that requiring specific ID will help Republicans. In May, a former GOP staffer in Wisconsin testified in federal court that Republican state senators were positively “giddy” over the prospects that people who tend to vote Democratic would be disenfranchised by the law.
As Berman points out, enforcement of the Wisconsin ruling will matter. And that could be a problem. North Carolina operated this past election under another court ruling that similarly calls for affidavits and provisional ballots to be used for voters who can prove they have a “reasonable impediment” barricading them from obtaining the mandated kind of ID. But many voters in the state weren't given an affidavit. And, as has been seen elsewhere, not all provisional ballots get counted for various reasons.
Nonetheless, the district court ruling is a welcome softening of the Wisconsin ID mandate—which should never have been enacted in the first place.