By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--October 30, 2017
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Here's a scenario for you: A woman wants to vote, but three days before the election she loses her driver's license. She shows up at the polls without ID, and they let her cast a provisional ballot, with the understanding that she has to return to show some sort of ID within three days in order for her vote to count. She is too busy, she says, and she never comes back.
Her vote doesn't count.After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County were surveyed about why they didn’t cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn’t have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote. According to the study’s author, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer, that finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” he says. “This particular election was very important to me. I felt like the right to vote was being stripped away from me.” Its impact was particularly acute in Milwaukee, where nearly two-thirds of the state’s African Americans live, 37 percent of them below the poverty line. Milwaukee is the most segregated city in the nation, divided between low-income black areas and middle-class white ones. It was known as the “Selma of the North” in the 1960s because of fierce clashes over desegregation. George Wallace once said that if he had to leave Alabama, “I’d want to live on the south side of Milwaukee.”
Neil Albrecht, Milwaukee’s election director, believes that the voter ID law and other changes passed by the Republican Legislature contributed significantly to lower turnout. Albrecht is 55 but seems younger, with bookish tortoise-frame glasses and salt-and-pepper stubble. (“I looked 12 until I became an election administrator,” he joked.) At his office in City Hall with views of the Milwaukee River, Albrecht showed me a color-coded map of the city’s districts, pointing out the ones where turnout had declined the most, including Anthony’s. Next to his desk was a poster that listed “Acceptable Forms of Photo ID.” “I would estimate that 25 to 35 percent of the 41,000 decrease in voters, or somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 voters, likely did not vote due to the photo ID requirement,” he said later. “It is very probable that between the photo ID law and the changes to voter registration, enough people were prevented from voting to have changed the outcome of the presidential election in Wisconsin.”So let me see if I have this straight: Between 10,000 and 15,000 voters failed to vote because they had lost their driver's licenses, or never had any, and couldn't find the time to get a state ID or take advantage of any of the other options the law provides in order for them to be able to vote. And every single one of these people would have voted for Hillary had they managed to meet the requirements. Several reactions to that:
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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