Have we mentioned that the state of Wisconsin, under Gov. Scott Walker, is essentially straight-up crooked? There's really no other explanation for new Republican-pushed voter ID laws that will bar about 9 percent of the state's eligible voters from the polls this year.
Wisconsin, one of the country’s most important battleground states, is one of 16 states with new voting restrictions in place since 2012. The five-hour lines in Arizona were the most recent example of America’s election problems. Wisconsin could be next. [...]
Others blocked from the polls include a man born in a concentration camp in Germany who lost his birth certificate in a fire; a woman who lost use of her hands but could not use her daughter as power of attorney at the DMV; and a 90-year-old veteran of Iwo Jima who could not vote with his veterans ID.
Yeah, that's who you want to go after. Concentration camp survivors, Iwo Jima veterans and disabled moms. Can't trust ‘em. Surely that 90-year-old veteran was trying to pull something.
And that doesn't even get into the specific efforts to disenfranchise student voters by declaring that almost no existing student IDs are good enough to satisfy the requirements.
That means many schools, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are issuing separate IDs for students to vote, an expensive and time-consuming process for students and administrators. Students who use the new IDs will also have to bring proof of enrollment from their schools, an extra burden of proof that only applies to younger voters.
All of this to solve a problem of "voter fraud" that nobody anywhere in America has been able to find evidence of even after a decade of (supposed) feverish looking.
So let's just be honest about this law—it's crooked. It's legislature-backed corruption for the sake of making it much, much harder for the "enemies" of those legislators to vote them out of office. It's putting financial barriers between American citizens and their polling booths for the purpose of discouraging as many of them as possible, especially the poor and the young, from voting at all.
About 300,000 residents of Wisconsin alone are going to be subjected to voter fraud perpetrated by the state's Republican Party—the fraud of saying that even though they're American citizens and have voted all their lives, they're not allowed to do it anymore.