David Michael Miller
Madison Laning, the chair of UW-Madison’s Student Leadership Council, spent last election cycle hustling to make sure her classmates were registered to vote. She estimates that she helped register about 3,000 of them.
Getting the necessary documentation was sometimes a hassle, and many complained that the process was taking too long. Now that the state has instituted voter identification requirements, she fears even more will be discouraged.
“There’s going to be a lot of students who will be turned away,” Laning predicts. “If they’re not able to get the proper identification and it’s going to take them another hour to get it, a lot of them won’t go back to the polls.”
And out-of-state students will be among the hardest hit by the state’s new voter ID requirement. At the UW-Madison campus alone, there are 14,000 such students. That number is big enough to swing even major races. For instance, Justice David Prosser beat JoAnne Kloppenburg by slightly more than 7,000 votes to retain his seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And in the 2000 presidential election in Wisconsin, Al Gore nudged out George W. Bush with fewer than 6,000 votes.
“Republicans in the state Legislature aren’t stupid,” says Ald. Mike Verveer, who has worked for years as an election clerk on the UW-Madison campus. “They realize college students vote overwhelmingly Democratic.”
Many critics of the new law are also disappointed UW-Madison officials aren’t taking bigger steps to protect students’ voting rights. Says state Sen. Mark Miller (D-Monona), “The university is avoiding irritating the Republicans.”
Last week, UW-Madison officials announced plans to create a separate voter identification card for students who need it, as an attempt to help them navigate the state’s new requirement that all voters have valid photo IDs to cast a ballot.
“To ensure students have the broadest awareness of the voter ID requirements, we’ll be expanding the way in which we get the cards into the hands of the students who need them,” Lori Berquam, vice provost for student life and dean of students, said in a news release.
The new law requires a photo ID and proof of residency to cast a ballot. For most people, a current state driver’s license (or a passport or military ID) will do the trick. But the campus’ out-of-state students will need some other form of ID in order to cast a ballot in Wisconsin because out-of-state driver’s licenses aren’t valid under the new law.
Standard student IDs won’t work because the voter ID needs to be one that is good for only two years, and includes a signature and photo, along with issue and expiration dates.
Other UW campuses, including Green Bay, are changing their student IDs to meet requirements. Rick Warpinski, director of UW-Green Bay’s University Union and Shorewood Golf Course, wrote to legislators that the cost will be negligible. The school has about 500 out-of-state students.
“We realize that after the first round of IDs expire, there will be some replacement costs, but that’s a cost we’re willing to pay to support the students’ access to vote,” says Warpinski.
Berquam tells Isthmus that it would be too expensive to adopt the same approach at UW-Madison, costing as much as $2 million over five years and creating security risks.
“What it boils down to is a cost issue,” she says. “We’re considerably larger than Green Bay. Our IDs are also used for access control, access to labs, into buildings...debit card accounts. It’s a little bit more detailed process than merely, here’s your new ID card.”
Warpinski says the Green Bay campus’ cards are also used for these functions.
The UW-Madison announced it will instead issue a separate ID card that can be used for voting but won’t be used for other UW functions. “This will just be a plastic card with photo, expiration date and a signature. The [Government Accountability Board] has approved the cards,” Berquam says. “It’s somewhere between 35 and 50 cents a card.”
But Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell says creating a new, single-purpose ID for voting is a terrible way to get students to the polls.
“We don’t like the secondary ID because you have to have it on you, an ID that does nothing, for several months. The chances of that getting lost or misplaced are pretty high,” he says.
Young students typically don’t think about voting until the last minute. “It’s only when they get into the last week that they think, ‘Oh, this election is important, I get to vote,’” McDonell says. “Then, do they have to have the ID they use for everything else, or do they have to have this other ID? Where do they find that other one? It’s just a flawed strategy.”
Berquam’s office said it would recruit and place volunteers outside of major student polling places to help students understand what they need to vote. But McDonell says that’s illegal.
“You can’t have people by polling places instructing voters. Why wouldn’t the Republican Party want to do the same thing? Or any other group?” he asks. “We’ve had that happen, and we send police to stop that stuff.”
“They need to talk to people who do this for a living,” McDonell adds. “I wouldn’t go talk to the janitor about how to design a course. That’s what they’re doing.”
Miller fears that if Wisconsin experiences a close election outside agitators will pour into the state to try to suppress turnout among likely Democratic voters, like students. And he worries that whatever replaces the Government Accountability Board, which the Legislature is in the process of dismantling, might not approve of the UW-Madison’s special voter IDs.
“It’s an obligation of the university to facilitate a student’s ability to vote in every way it can. The additional expense of issuing a card for two years versus five years is well worth it when you consider the important lesson it provides,” he says. “I really think the university is shortchanging its students and it’s shortchanging our democratic principles.”
