The fight to save democracy

LeSandra Perkins admits she is skeptical that voting makes much of a difference. The system feels rigged to her.

Nevertheless, she’s a dedicated voter. She voted for the first time when she was 18 years old, casting a ballot for Barack Obama. “It felt amazing, especially when he won,” she says. “My president is black. He will forever be my president.”

But voting has become more difficult for Perkins and others. She moved from Milwaukee to the west side of Madison in December 2015. The following spring, Perkins went to the Lussier Center across from her apartment on North Gammon Road to vote for the state Supreme Court race.

Voting that day took more than an hour, as she had to go back to her apartment for a bill in order to prove her residency and register. On Aug. 14, she wanted to vote in the Democratic primary, but she didn’t think her ID was valid because it didn’t have her current address, a common misconception.

Now, with the Nov. 6 general election pending, Perkins wants to make sure nothing keeps her from voting. And so on Aug. 17, two volunteers drove her to the DMV office in Middleton so she could get a free voter ID.

“Everybody I’ve talked to, I’m encouraging to vote,” says Perkins, shortly after getting a temporary ID with a photo. “Saying your concerns to a friend or a family member and then not doing anything about it, is pointless to me. Why have an opinion? We’re given a chance to vote, so why not take that opportunity?”

Critics of photo ID laws like Wisconsin’s say they’re designed to suppress voter turnout among people of color, college students and the poor.

A study by UW-Madison professor Ken Mayer released in 2017 found that the new law kept almost 17,000 people in Dane and Milwaukee counties from voting in the 2016 presidential election.

Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, a Republican, told conservative talk show host Vicki McKenna that the new requirement likely swung the 2016 election for his party. “How many of your listeners really, honestly, are sure that [U.S. Sen. Ron] Johnson was going to win re-election or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?” Schimel said in April.

The legal case challenging the state’s voter ID requirement remains in limbo. Some parts of the law were invalidated a few years ago, but the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago has yet to rule on a challenge to it, despite hearing arguments over it in February 2017.

But Molly McGrath, a voting rights champion who is leading the ACLU’s efforts to get people in Wisconsin to the polls, says that the court challenges are just part of the resistance.

Another part of it is quietly happening on the ground, as volunteers fan out registering people and helping them get the IDs needed to cast ballots.

In 2016, McGrath was about the only person helping people register and get voter IDs in Wisconsin. Now, she’s coordinating hundreds of volunteers — but could use more help.

“We were putting this smoke signal up in Wisconsin about what this ID law meant and what voter suppression meant,” McGrath says. “We realized that as essential as the court battles are, the real game is the ground game and the grass roots organizing.”

McGrath notes that the work these volunteers do is often grueling — knocking on countless doors on cold days and hot ones — and there’s no guarantee it will work.

“[Wisconsin] is really the laboratory where democracy is dying,” she says. “This is really ground zero for the fight for voting rights. What the photo ID law does in Wisconsin is suppress the vote.”

It’s left to everyday people to try to save democracy, McGrath says. “Are we under an obligation to do everything we can and get everybody to lace up their sneakers and grab a clipboard? Yes,” she says. “But we still might not be able to do enough.”

The temperature is creeping up toward 90 as Julia Gilden begins knocking on doors on the far east side of Madison near Sycamore Park on a Saturday in August.

It’s a working-class neighborhood of townhouses and apartment buildings. At one building on Jana Lane, she buzzes apartments in succession before a middle-aged man pokes his head out.

She launches into her spiel: “Hi, my name is Julia, I’m a volunteer with the ACLU. We’re just in the neighborhood today making sure people can vote in the next election if they want to. Do you have a current license or ID card?”

The man says he doesn’t have an ID and doesn’t want any help getting one, before quickly shutting the door.

As we walk to the next building, Gilden says, “That’s the nature of the worst encounter — people who just don’t want to talk to you. And I don’t take it personally. It’s not about me.”

A senior scientist at Promega, Gilden is canvassing this neighborhood because it’s part of Ward 18. “My approach has been to pick low-turnout wards,” says Gilden. “Who you decide to reach is one of the most important things.”

So she prints out maps of these low-turnout neighborhoods and divvies up the territory with other volunteers. Today, she’s one of seven knocking on doors in the neighborhood.

“Even though you get a lot of ‘not home,’ when you get to talk to someone, it’s almost always a good interaction,” Gilden says. “And it feels like real action. It’s a thing that takes effort and nobody else was going to do it if you didn’t.”

Voter outreach is largely tedious. Of the 115 doors Gilden knocks on this Saturday afternoon, there’s no answer at 94. Most of those who answer have what they need. One man says he’s still “on paper,” meaning he has a conviction and his voting rights haven’t yet been restored. Three people need to register. It’s within 20 days before the primary, so Gilden can’t register them on the spot. She explains how they can register at the polls and tells them where their polling location is, the Hy-Vee at 3801 E. Washington Ave.

She gives everyone she talks to a card explaining what counts as a valid ID. The card includes a hotline (608-285-2141) to connect with an ACLU volunteer who can help voters obtain an ID.

Some voting outreach volunteers Gilden works with occasionally suggest setting up tables at the farmers’ market or at a Mallards game. Gilden would rather go to places that have been ignored. Although she likes being outdoors and chatting to people, approaching strangers doesn’t come naturally to her.

“The one thing I try to think about, the more inconvenient or scary it seems to approach a place, the less likely it is that anybody has ever asked that person to vote,” she says.

After being tied up in court for almost three years, voter ID went into effect in Wisconsin in February 2016. The law requires anyone voting to show a photo identification in order to vote. Valid identification includes a Wisconsin driver’s license, a military ID, a U.S. passport, a Veterans Affairs card, a Wisconsin Tribal ID card, a certificate of naturalization, a temporary ID receipt from the state DMV, and a state voter ID card, which can be obtained for free.

Out-of-state drivers’ licenses are not acceptable, nor are student ID cards if they don’t include a photo, signature and have a two-year expiration date. Adding to the confusion, some recently expired state IDs are valid. And, there’s a persistent belief that an ID has to have a voter’s current address on it — it doesn’t.

In the November 2016 presidential election, statewide turnout was 67 percent — down 3 points from 2012 and the lowest turnout for a presidential election since 2000. In Dane County, turnout dropped from 84.7 percent in 2012 to 82.4 percent in 2016.

Mother Jones magazine argued that voter ID threw the election in Wisconsin for Donald Trump, who won here with fewer than 23,000 votes. But The Washington Post found the evidence for that tenuous and said several factors played a role. And while it’s widely accepted that voter ID laws suppress turnout, FiveThirtyEight reports that it’s hard to determine if it has swung elections.

McGrath says it doesn’t matter if elections aren’t being altered because of voter ID.

“The question is ‘were our fellow Americans denied the right to vote?’ And we know the answer is yes because we’ve talked to these voters, I’ve sat in their living rooms, I’ve taken them to the DMV. We know that people were disenfranchised in Wisconsin,” she says. “The right to vote isn’t violated in bulk or in the margin of an election. It’s a unique individual’s own precious right to vote.”

The Madison clerk’s office keeps statistics on people who are unable to vote or forced to use a provisional ballot because of ID issues. In the 2016 presidential election 423 people didn’t have an ID, 139 had unacceptable ones and 62 had out-of-state IDs.

Confusion over the law is probably keeping others from even trying to vote, says Madison clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl.

“I have talked to people who told me ‘I didn’t vote last election because I didn’t update my address with the DMV,’” she says. “They didn’t realize that that didn’t matter — it doesn’t affect your right to vote.

“A lot of people just pull out their ID and ask me, is this okay?” she adds.

Dane County is about to launch an advertising and mailing campaign — working with the ACLU, the NAACP and the League of Women Voters — that will explain what’s needed to vote and how people can get help.

To hear U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson describe it, Wisconsin’s elections were regularly stolen before the state passed its voter ID law in 2011.

“There have been a number of incidents documented of busloads of people or van loads of people voting multiple times at different voting booths with pretty flimsy IDs,” Johnson told an Isthmus reporter in 2012, before the state’s law was being implemented.

“We need to make sure that real voters and legitimate voters have their votes counted and are not detracted by illegal voters,” he said.

Numerous studies have found that voter fraud by impersonation is extremely rare. Still, many Republicans insist it happens. A 2017 poll by The Washington Post found that 68 percent of Republicans believe “millions of illegal immigrants” voted in the 2016 election.

Republicans “genuinely believe that Democrats are committing fraud, that they’re opening up African American districts in Milwaukee and just letting everybody vote,” says Scott McDonell, Dane County clerk.

State Rep. Scott Krug (R-Nekoosa) believes that there were people who voted illegally before Wisconsin passed the ID law, which he cosponsored. “But even if somebody wouldn’t buy into that notion, I still think it makes sense for us to be able to identify who we are when we’re walking in to exercise our right to vote,” he tells Isthmus.

McDonell fears that Republicans are preparing more barriers to voting. He notes a recent report by the far-right MacIver Institute that claims there were almost 4,000 cases in Wisconsin of voter fraud — by people who registered on the day of a vote — that went uninvestigated by officials.

“I think they’ve heard from Trump about all these fradulent voters and so now they’re trying to find them for him,” McDonell says.

McDonell’s worries about some Republicans’ desire to get rid of same-day registration — it’s in the Wisconsin GOP’s official platform, which reads “same day voter registration furthers this potential for fraud by not allowing ample time to verify the voter’s citizenship or residence.”

But McDonell notes that same day registration is a safeguard against election tampering. If Russia, for instance, were to hack into registration records and delete voters names right before an election, people could still vote by registering at the polls.

Back in the Jim Crow days, Carol Anderson says, there was a “rogues gallery” of states that were the worst offenders of human rights: Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia.

Anderson, who is a professor of African American studies at Emory University in Atlanta, sees another set of states forming a new rogues gallery in suppressing voters’ rights. High on the list of offenders is Wisconsin, along with Texas, North Carolina and Kansas.

“We’ve got another constellation of the usual suspects, of those who are systematically working to undermine the rights of people to vote,” Anderson says. “And they’re proud of it.”

Anderson wrote the forthcoming One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy (she’s speaking at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Oct. 13.)

Her book notes familiar patterns between the Jim Crow era and today. Starting with the Mississippi Plan of 1890, Southern states began passing an assortment of poll taxes requiring people to pay to vote, and literacy tests requiring that people could show they could read and understand obscure laws. These measures were couched in language that people needed to be informed and democracy had to be funded, Anderson says.

“You make it sound reasonable. Democracy is expensive...so it just seems reasonable that we should ask people to help bear that cost for democracy,” she says. “But when you’re poor, paying that poll tax is really hard, especially when it’s cumulative.” She notes that literacy tests happened at the same time Southern states were defunding black schools.

The laws had the intended effect of keeping black people — and many poor whites — from voting. In Louisiana in 1896, more than 130,000 black people were registered to vote, she writes in One Person, No Vote. By 1904, only 1,342 black people were. Alabama’s voter rolls plunged from 180,000 black people to fewer than 3,000. In 1940, only 3 percent of black adults were registered to vote in the South.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended these laws. The act’s “preclearance clause” required states with a history of voter suppression to get approval from the federal government before altering voting procedures, such as changing hours or closing polling locations.

But in 2013, the Supreme Court ruling Shelby County v. Holder ended preclearance. Soon after the decision, several Republican-dominated states passed laws requiring voter ID, Anderson says. They used many of the same arguments Southern states did in the 19th century.

“This is about ‘protecting the integrity of the ballot box from rampant voter fraud.’ It’s a lie,” she says. “It’s a well-documented lie but it’s been said so many times and so often by respectable people that it has traction in the American narrative.”

Although the Shelby ruling opened the door for new voter suppression laws, Anderson says something else provided the inspiration for them: the election of Barack Obama as president.

His 2008 campaign for president coincided with the mobilization of 2 million more black voters, 2 million more Latino voters and 600,000 more Asian Americans, Anderson says. And the number of voters making $15,000 or less a year almost doubled.

“That’s one heck of a coalition,” she says. “We should be applauding that. When you have people invested in democracy, it makes the nation more vibrant. Instead, the response was ‘we have got to get these people out of the ballot box.’”

Anderson still has hope that American democracy can prevail. She points to the 2017 U.S. Senate race in Georgia — one of the worst states for voter suppression. Georgia has a voter ID law and has a 1901 law that forbid anyone convicted of a crime of “moral turpitude” from voting, even though it refused to define “moral turpitude” for more than 100 years.

Court challenges forced the state to finally define moral turpitude and a volunteer effort helped register and get thousands of black voters to the polls. One of her favorite work-arounds was the use of mug shots as legitimate voter ID. Black voters turned out in high numbers for the Nov. 7, 2017, special election that sent Doug Jones to the Senate over Roy Moore, whom numerous women had accused of sexual assault when they were teenagers.

“Civil society stood up and basically said, ‘not today Satan,’” Anderson says. “And then figured out the structure of that inequality and then put in a program to overcome every one of those barriers.”

When Jyl Molle attended the Women’s March in Las Vegas in January, she was struck by an appeal from one of the speakers.

“I can still hear one of the women who was speaking, an African American woman, saying, ‘Okay all you white ladies, would you please get engaged and reach out to the black community,’” remembers Molle, a retired school teacher. “It was like, plonk, right in my face.”

Molle and her twin sister, Ginger McIntosh, and their friend, Claudia Progreba, knew the perfect place to put that directive into action: Wexford Ridge Apartments, an affordable housing development off of Gammon Road where many people of color live.

They have routinely canvassed on the west side and have always had trouble getting traction in Wexford. So they made it their mission to get to know every single resident in the 288-unit development. Their goal is to register everyone to vote and help anyone who needs an ID get one.

“A lot of people are registered, but they’re missing the photo ID component of it,” Molle says. “That’s going to change.”

As of late August, they’re a little more than half way to their goal, having done two passes through the complex. On the Aug. 14 primary, Molle, McIntosh and Progreba knock on several doors there.

They’re well known in the development, especially by the kids riding bikes or coloring on the sidewalk. They know the work requires investment — getting to know the residents and building trust so they can help them navigate the often exasperating bureaucracy inherent in places like the DMV office. “The comfort zone doesn’t expand much beyond the housing area,” Progreba says.

But the three are happy to put in the time, chatting with residents about relatives out-of-state, a grandson’s struggles, a woman’s nascent baking business, or a recent string of car thefts.

They helped one Wexford resident, Anntionette Rhodes, get a voter ID. And earlier on Aug. 14, she met them at the polling place at the Lussier Center where they helped her register.

At first Rhodes is a little flustered, digging through her purse to find the documents she knows she brought to register. But once she’s filled out the papers and votes, she’s excited and laughing, posing for a photo with Progreba and Molle.

Rhodes used to live in Illinois and she’s been voting consistently since she turned 18 in 2006. But since moving to Wisconsin two-and-a-half years ago, voting has become more difficult.

“It means everything. If I don’t vote, maybe the wrong person gets into office,” she says. “One year, I didn’t get to vote and I was like, ‘oh, my gosh. I know it’s one little vote, but it counts.’”

Like Sen. Johnson, the MacIver Institute and many Republicans, Rhodes also believes that people have been tampering with the voting process. Her faith in democracy is a bit wobbly. But she doesn’t think it’s the voters who are doing the meddling.

“They cheated to get the president in, Donald Trump,” Rhodes says. “That’s just the truth. They cheated for him to get in, because I don’t see how people can take him seriously.

“They cheated for him to get up in there. It’s real possible. That’s what I think.” 

Approved Wisconsin IDs for voting 2018

•  Wisconsin Driver’s License—If expired can still be used if expiration date is after November 8, 2016.

•  Wisconsin State ID Card—If expired can still be used if expiration date is after November 8, 2016.

•  Military ID Card—If expired can still be used if expiration date is after November 8, 2016.

•  U.S. Passport—If expired can still be used if expiration date is after November 8, 2016.

•  Veterans Affairs Card—Must be unexpired or have no expiration date.

•  Wisconsin Tribal ID—Can be used as a current or expired ID.

•  Certificate of Naturalization—Must be issued within two years of voting day.

•  Student ID from Wisconsin Accredited College—Must be signed, have issuance date, and expire within 2 years of issuance. Also bring proof of enrollment when voting.

•  ID, Driver’s License, or IDPP Receipt from DMV—Must be unexpired.

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To register to vote: myvote.wi.gov

To volunteer to help others registeror get an ID: voteridwisconsin.org

For help getting a voter ID,call: 608-285-2141