David Michael Miller
Molly McGrath is a Madison-based staff member with the national group VoteRiders, which helps people struggling with new state voting restrictions. Over the last year she worked full time every day on that problem in Wisconsin, answering questions from people who lack the proper credentials or are confused by the new rules.
“I have talked to voters all over the state — Beloit to Superior, Cameron, Marshfield, Neenah, St. Croix Falls, Kenosha, Plymouth — and everywhere in between,” she says. “We have a helpline where we get calls every day.”
And how bad is the problem of voter suppression?
“I would say it’s an epidemic in Wisconsin.”
Madison had a high turnout for the presidential election. Even so, McGrath says, “there were a significant number of people who didn’t vote because of this. If you make something harder to do, less people are going to do it.”
But the problem was much bigger in Milwaukee, where nearly 60,000 fewer votes were cast this year than in 2012. As The Capital Times reported, “Clinton earned about 43,000 fewer votes in the Democratic stronghold than Obama did four years ago.”
Given that Donald Trump won the state by just 27,000 votes, that 43,000 margin by itself made the difference.
Neil Albrecht, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, told the Journal Sentinel, “we had some of the greatest declines in the districts we projected would have the most trouble with ID requirements.” He said four districts of the city with the most “transient, high-poverty” residents experienced trouble with people struggling to meet the photo ID requirements. “We had a lot of calls” about such problems, he added.
Ari Berman, writing for The Nation, notes that in Wisconsin, “300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lacked strict forms of voter ID” and that voter turnout “decreased 13 percent in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of the state’s African American population lives.”
Milwaukee also has more than 50,000 students attending colleges and universities like UW-Milwaukee and Marquette. And university students, says McGrath, often have out-of-state driver’s licenses that can’t be used to vote without additional identification forms. Many, she says, are first-time voters who can be confused about the new requirements.
Former Republican legislative aide Todd Allbaugh testified in federal court that Republican lawmakers were giddy about the voter ID law and the impact it would have on elections. As he recalled, Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin) said, “Hey, we’ve got to think about what this would mean for the neighborhoods around Milwaukee and the college campuses.”
As McGrath puts it, “I think it’s more than coincidence that in areas legislators were targeting, like low-income neighborhoods in Milwaukee, we’ve seen a decrease in the turnout.”
The problem of voters confused by the rules, she says, was compounded by inaccurate information being provided by state Division of Motor Vehicle staff. VoteRiders provided audios of misleading statements by DMV workers to federal court, and state officials later admitted workers were giving out inaccurate information.
The biggest impact from these new barriers to voting comes not from people turned away from the polls, but from those discouraged from even showing up. A study of one Texas congressional district in 2014 found that of some 271,000 registered voters who didn’t vote, 12.8 percent said it was because they thought they lacked the needed credentials under the new law. That’s more than 34,000 people.
Hillary Clinton is currently leading in the national popular vote and is expected to win, much like Al Gore did in 2000 while also losing in the electoral college. That leaves Republicans with just one popular vote victory in the last seven presidential elections. And the challenge grows worse every four years as the electorate’s Democrat-leaning minority percentage grows ever greater. It’s in this context that Republicans have passed draconian restrictions on voting in states they control.
Republicans can’t win the presidency without winning battleground states like Wisconsin, where Democratic presidential candidates had won seven straight elections. They finally accomplished that, but barely, and did they win fairly?
Scot Ross of the liberal One Wisconsin Institute, says restrictive voting laws could have turned the state red for the first time in 32 years of presidential elections. “I’d need more data,” he says “but 27,000 votes isn’t all that many when you think about the number of people without ID.”
Tom Evenson, spokesperson for Gov. Scott Walker, has denied that voter restrictions are a problem, pointing to the high turnout for the spring presidential primary. But it’s always the fall presidential primary that gets the highest turnout, and this year’s was the lowest in 20 years, since the low-interest Bill Clinton-Bob Dole race.
“Voter suppression is alive and well in Wisconsin,” says McGrath, “and for elected officials to say this didn’t have an impact is a lie to the people they serve.”
Bruce Murphy is the editor of UrbanMilwaukee.com.
