Wisconsin voter ID law leaves state braced for primary day chaos

“Arizona is going to have been a piece of cake” compared with Tuesday’s primary in Wisconsin, said Arvina Martin, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and chair of the Democratic party of Wisconsin’s American Indian caucus.

She was comparing the potential effects of Wisconsin’s strictest-in-the-nation voter identification law to the five-hour waits to vote during last month’s Arizona primary. (The US Department of Justice announced on Friday that it would investigate the problems in Arizona, which occurred when Maricopa County reduced the number of polling places from 200 in 2012 to 60 in 2016.)

Tuesday’s state primary in Wisconsin – which is also a general election for state and local judicial candidates – will be the first high-turnout election here since the law went into effect. The state’s government accountability board estimates that about 40% of the state’s eligible voters will go to the polls, which would be the highest turnout in a primary since 1980.

Advocates for and against the law agree that approximately 300,000 eligible voters lack eligible photo IDs – in part because, as a staffer for the voter ID bill’s lead sponsor, state representative Jeff Stone, told the Racine Journal Times in 2012: “When the bill was being drafted, we were trying to limit the number [of eligible forms of identification], not expand it.”

The list of eligible identification is, as a result, short. If the cards were valid as of the 2014 general election, voters can show: a Wisconsin driver’s license; a non-driver’s ID issued by the state department of transportation; a military ID card issued by a US uniformed service; a US passport; or an identification card issued by a federally recognized Native American tribe with land in Wisconsin.

Those rules mean, for example, that tribal IDs from tribes without land in Wisconsin are ineligible; expired driver’s licenses or passports are ineligible; and out-of-state licenses, even if valid, are ineligible, among other commonly used forms of ID. And, advocates note, the state’s computer systems went down for three hours on Friday, which caused problems for in-person absentee voters and those attempting to obtain eligible identification before the primary.

Without a driver’s license or federal ID, voters can, as of last month (which was after February’s primary for judicial elections), show an unexpired photo ID issued by the Veteran’s Health Administration; a certificate of naturalization, if it’s less than two years old; or a receipt for a driver’s license or non-driver’s identification card that is less than 45 days old, since Governor Scott Walker’s administration outsourced the production of driver’s licenses to California in 2011 and otherwise eligible voters have to wait to receive them in the mail.

The state’s college and university students face special restrictions if they choose to show a student ID at the polls: though most universities issue cards with expiration dates five years after matriculation and without a signature, students must show a student ID at the polls with a date of issuance, the student’s signature and an expiration date of no more than two years after the date of issuance. As a result, many universities have begun issuing secondary student IDs that comply with the laws. If students choose to use university-issued IDs at the polls, they must then also show proof of current enrollment, such as a paid tuition bill or a certified class schedule in order to vote.

Many activists see the new, restrictive rules as a deliberate effort to limit who can vote. Analiese Eicher, the program director for One Wisconsin Institute, said: “The voter ID law is just one aspect of a multi-pronged attempt to suppress the vote at every turn, from voter registration to the moment they cast their ballot.”

She added: “It’s clear that students were targeted with significant restrictions on their IDs and the higher burden they now have in accessing their right to vote.”

Robert Dempsey, the Wisconsin director for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, is concerned – particularly about the student vote, and particularly after in-person early absentee voting ended last week. “We’ve already seen [problems] … in the interactions our supporters have had in their efforts to vote early,” he said.

Sanders himself has decried the new law. “I have contempt, absolute contempt, for Republican governors who do not have the guts to support free, open and fair elections,” he said on Saturday in Milwaukee.

On Monday, Dempsey said: “We hope for the best, but are prepared for the worst” when it comes to the disenfranchisement of the campaign’s would-be voters. He explained that staffers had been targeting all voters with lists of what identification would pass muster and even made a video explainer.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is also concerned that its voters could miss out on the opportunity to cast a ballot – and rightly so, as ThinkProgress published an account on Saturday of a would-be Clinton voter, Nefertiti Helem, who won’t be able to obtain an ID card from the state of Wisconsin in time to vote because officials have to attempt to verify her birth certificate.

In addition to training campaign volunteers to explain the new requirements to potential voters, the Hillary for Wisconsin press secretary, Yianni Varonis, said Clinton “has repeatedly spoken out against restrictive and unnecessary laws that block access to the ballot box – like the voter ID requirement in Wisconsin – and proposed proactive measures like automatic registration for 18-year-olds to ensure all eligible Americans can participate”.

Molly McGrath, the national campaign coordinator for Vote Riders, thinks the new laws are inherently unfair. “What we have is people changing the rules of the game but not telling the players,” she said.

She pointed to a Marquette University poll from mid-February that showed at least 16% of voters didn’t even know that a photo ID would be required to vote as evidence that there was likely to be widespread confusion on Tuesday.

Anita Johnson, an organizer with Citizen Action of Wisconsin in Milwaukee who has accompanied voters to the department of motor vehicles to obtain ID cards, worked to educate citizens about the new requirements and helped many voters personally follow up on the status of their applications for identification, is offended by what the new requirements will mean for many voters. “You should not be intimidated when you go to the polls to vote,” she said. “You should not be confused when you go to the polls to vote.”

The government accountability board, which would normally manage outreach efforts to inform voters, reportedly approached one of the voter identification bill sponsors in October in an effort to secure funding for an educational campaign. Instead, the legislature voted to dismantle the agency entirely in 2016, and organizations like One Wisconsin, Vote Riders, Citizen Action and the League of Women Voters have been forced to pick up the slack.

It’s not enough.

Jenni Dye, the research director with the One Wisconsin Institute, said the group had already seen problems as people tried to obtain compliant IDs. “People have been rejected for a number of reasons.

“In some cases, a misspelling of someone’s name is preventing people from voting,” she said.

That’s what happened to Ruthelle Frank, a plaintiff in the ACLU’s lawsuit against the law. When the state legislature first passed the law in 2011, a spelling mistake on her birth certificate prevented her from obtaining a non-driver photo ID. Correcting the birth certificate would have cost her up to $200. “I’m so old now, what am I going to do with a $200 birth certificate?” she said in 2014. “Hang it on the wall?”

Frank isn’t alone. Johnson, the Citizen Action organizer, worked with a voter from August 2015 until March 2016 to help him obtain an eligible photo ID from the state. Dennis Hatton, a veteran, had everything he needed except for his birth certificate, which he petitioned the state to track down by providing all his personal information going back to his elementary school days.

After months, the state came back and told him that his birth certificate listed his name as Denet’, not Dennis; the discrepancy between his birth certificate and his social security card, they said, would mean he had to change one of them – which would either cost him money or time. After multiple phone calls from Johnson, the agency finally located Hatton’s first application for a social security card, which listed his first name as Denet’; they agreed on that basis, finally, to issue him a photo ID, and he will be able to vote on Tuesday.

But after helping many economically marginalized minority, elderly and disabled residents in Milwaukee obtain photo IDs, Johnson believes that these are not unintended consequences of an otherwise well-intentioned law. “This law was strategically compiled to stop people from voting,” she said. “They knew exactly what they were doing.”