OPINION

No, voter ID debate isn't over

Scot Ross

Republicans are trumpeting that since Wisconsin had an election in April and people went to the polls in high numbers, no one was disenfranchised under the state's restrictive voter ID law. But it turns out this claim is as credible as Donald Trump predicting he would win Wisconsin's primary.

A recent filing in a lawsuit brought by One Wisconsin Institute and other voter rights advocates exposed serious flaws at the Department of Motor Vehicles in providing Wisconsinites with the ID that voters must now produce to cast their ballot at the polls.

Despite the inability of Wisconsin Republicans to provide, in court and under oath, even one instance of the in-person voter fraud they claim is so rampant, they passed one of the nation's most restrictive and disenfranchising voter ID laws. Added to the unseemliness is the admission of the co-author of the voter ID bill and Republican U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman on the April election night that voter ID would help Republicans win Wisconsin's Electoral College votes for the first time in more than 30 years.

As part of the voter ID law adopted by Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature, individuals are ostensibly able to request a free identification card from the DMV under certain circumstances. But, instead, bureaucratic delays and improper denials are preventing legal voters from obtaining the ID they need to vote.

An internal DMV analysis found an error rate of 27 percent under the "extraordinary proof" petition process to permit voters to obtain exemptions for having to pay for birth certificates or other government records needed to obtain voter ID, meaning more than one in four petitions were mishandled between March and August of 2015. And the problem is expected to get worse.

Here are just some examples cited in the institute's lawsuit of how the DMV process is broken, resulting in eligible individuals being denied IDs, and therefore their right to vote, including:

  • Refusing to provide an ID to a woman who had lost the use of her hands and couldn't sign an application. The woman brought her daughter with her to sign the application and even provided her daughter with power of attorney giving her permission to sign, but the DMV did not allow it.
  • Denying the petitions of eligible voters because of minor discrepancies in the spelling of their names or uncertainties about their exact dates of birth — even though DMV acknowledges it has no doubts these disenfranchised voters are U.S. citizens.
  • Turning away a senior citizen who had been born in a concentration camp in Germany, and his German birth certificate had been lost in a fire. That citizen was ultimately granted an ID, but only after extraordinary effort on his behalf to comply with absurd demands by the DMV.

When the DMV erroneously denies someone an ID or incompetence and bureaucratic delays result in a person giving up in anger or frustration, our state is denying a legal voter his or her right to vote. That is unacceptable.

To be clear: the real fraud in Wisconsin elections is partisan politicians such as Walker and Grothman manipulating the laws for political gain.

Scot Ross is the executive director of One Wisconsin Institute.