Voting Rights
Voter suppression in Wisconsin directly affected last year's election, Mother Jones investigation finds
In the 2016 election, President Trump won the state of Wisconsin by almost 23,000 votes. But a new report from Mother Jones published online Thursday found that statewide voter turnout in the Badger State was also the lowest it had been since 2000.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the 2016 election was also the first major contest in Wisconsin to require registered voters to bring a current, valid form of state or national identification to the polls — just one of 33 election changes passed under Gov. Scott Walker (R). Other restrictions reduced early voting hours and restricted early voting locations.
Such policies are ostensibly instituted to prevent or discourage voter fraud, but Mother Jones points out that black voters were about 50 percent less likely to have a form of current ID than white voters. And when it comes to trying to renew those IDs or get new ones altogether, 85 percent of people denied identification by the DMV were black or Latino.
Milwaukee's election director Neil Albrecht agreed that the new laws had a direct national impact: "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." And discouraged, would-be voters in Wisconsin know it. "This particular election was very important to me," said Andrea Anthony, a Wisconsin woman whose license was expired at the time of voting last year. "I felt like the right to vote was being stripped away from me." Read the full report from Mother Jones here.