Ari Berman has for years been doing yeoman’s work getting out the message about voter suppression. That work includes an entire book on the subject, titled Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. At The Nation today, he takes note of yet another example: students at the Green Bay campus of the University of Wisconsin. Back to that in a moment.
Efforts to suppress the student vote have been a thing ever since 18-year-olds got the vote in 1971 with the ratification of the 26th Amendment. The methods have been many, from outright denial of their right to vote where they go to college based on long-term residency—which the Supreme Court shot down in Dunn v. Blumstein—to sneakier methods, like scaring students into believing they will lose their student financial assistance. Legally, there remains much ambiguity in what is and is not okay for a state to do regarding restrictions on the student vote. (Here’s the Brennan Center for Justice’s excellent state-by-state Student Voting Guide for 2016.)
In Green Bay during the primary, there was a long queue at the campus polling station. So long, in fact, that some students gave up trying to cast a ballot. When the polls closed, 150 were still in line. Student political groups across the spectrum asked that an early voting station be established on campus to alleviate those lines on Election Day. No such luck.
Instead, municipal authorities only set up one early voting station for the whole city, Wisconsin’s third largest, at the city clerk’s office. It’s a 15-minute drive from the campus and only open for voting during business hours. The city clerk, Kris Teske, appointed by Republican Mayor Jim Schmitt and allied with Republican Gov. Scott Walker, claimed the reason for this was that Green Bay didn’t have the money, time, or security to open an early voting station on campus or anywhere else.
But privately Teske gave a different reason for opposing an early-voting site at UW–Green Bay, writing that student voting would benefit the Democratic Party. “UWGB is a polling location for students and residents on Election Day but I feel by asking for this to be the site for early voting is encouraging the students to vote more than benefiting the city as a whole,” she wrote on August 26 in an e-mail to David Buerger, counsel at the Wisconsin Ethics Commission. “I have heard it said that students lean more toward the democrats…. I have spoken with our Chief of Staff and others at City Hall and they agree that budget wise this isn’t going to happen. Do I have an argument about it being more of a benefit to the democrats?”
Berman got that email as a result of an open records request from One Wisconsin Institute.
Join Daily Kos and Vote Riders in volunteering to give people in Wisconsin (and Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona) rides to the polls.
Back in 2014, the Republican-dominated Wisconsin legislature dumped all after hours and weekend early voting and limited it to one site per city. A federal court stepped in:
“The court finds that the legislature specifically targeted large municipalities—Milwaukee in particular—intending to curtail minority voting,” wrote Federal District Court Judge James Peterson, who said Republicans were “suppressing the votes of reliably Democratic minority voters.”
As a result of the court decision, Madison opened 11 early voting locations, including at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Edgewood College, and Milwaukee opened three sites, with a massive increase in hours from 2012. State Representative Eric Genrich proposed opening an early-voting location at UW–Green Bay for 20 hours during the week before Election Day, at a cost of no more than $10,000, which the city had a surplus to pay for, but the city clerk wouldn’t budge. The early voting turnout in Green Bay has so far lagged behind the rest of the county and the state.
As Berman points out, this is part of a coordinated attack on student voting in general. The refusal to accept student IDs unless they have a two-year expiration date and a photo has made it difficult for many students. Students must also provide proof of enrollment and proof of residency via utility bills or signed leases and the like. But if you live in a group situation, that can be difficult since the utility charges may be included in the rent and the landlord gets the bill.
When the ID law was passed state Sen. Mary Lazich, a Republican, voted for it, saying, “We’ve got to think about what this could mean for the neighborhoods around Milwaukee and the college campuses around the state.”
Obviously, it has meant screwing with citizens’ rights to cast ballots based on the likelihood they won’t vote for Republicans, as the Green Bay email proves. The vote suppressors are relentless.