University of Wisconsin students cast ballots for the 2012 presidential election and several state offices at a campus voting station.
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.
Comments are closed on this story.