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Reject GOP's voter suppression scheme

An editorial  —  5/07/2008 9:39 am

State Rep. Jeff Stone, a Milwaukee County Republican who represents a traditionally Democratic district, has a plan to keep his seat in the Legislature.

Stone wants to make voting harder -- in some cases, impossible -- for young people, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, people of color and members of other demographic groups that tend to back Democrats.

As soon as the U.S. Supreme Court issued a wrong-headed decision upholding Indiana's restrictive voter identification law, Stone was promising to make Wisconsin Hoosier country. The Indiana law was designed by win-at-any-cost Republican strategists in Washington with the goal of depressing Democratic turnout in that state.

"It is time that we get this passed here in Wisconsin," growled Stone, who for years has worked to erect barriers to voter participation. "There are no excuses left for not having this as part of our election process."

The "this" that Stone describes is a burdensome requirement that voters produce a photo ID or jump through a series of additional hoops before they can cast a ballot.

The League of Women Voters, civil rights and disability rights organizations, as well as groups representing the elderly, have all raised practical objections to the stringent requirements that Stone and his allies seek to implement as part of a plan devised by former White House political czar Karl Rove to realize his dream of gaming the system sufficiently to establish permanent Republican dominance of American politics.

A divided Supreme Court has given Stone some ammunition. But Wisconsin does not have to let him shoot down democracy with it.

Democrats, independents and responsible Republicans -- of which there are still many in this state -- should heed the wisdom of Justice David Souter, who argued in his dissent from last week's ruling that Indiana's voter ID law "threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting rights of tens of thousands of the state's citizens."

The same would be the case in Wisconsin.

And we know precisely which groups would be disenfranchised. According to a University of Wisconsin study:

-- Roughly 23 percent of people aged 65 and over lack a valid photo ID.

-- Roughly 70 percent of African-American young adults, ages 18-24, lack a valid driver's license -- the primary form of photo ID -- while roughly 65 percent of Hispanic young adults lack a driver's license.

-- Disproportionate numbers of African-American and Hispanic adults in Milwaukee County lack a photo ID. Indeed, Stone's requirement would hit minority citizens three times as hard as whites.

These figures call into question the argument that the Bush administration's Justice Department made to the Supreme Court, which was grounded in the theory that photo requirements have no discriminatory impact on minority citizens, seniors or the young.

The reality is that the requirement Jeff Stone proposes is discriminatory. In time, this reality will be confirmed at the polls and the Supreme Court will reverse itself.

Unfortunately, if Wisconsin implements a photo requirement similar to Indiana's law, that reversal will only come after eligible voters have been discouraged from casting ballots.

Perhaps that's OK by Indiana.

But it should not be OK by Wisconsin.

This state has a history of running honest elections with some of the highest turnouts in the nation. We've done so by maintaining an open and inviting electoral process that has plenty of checks and balances against voter fraud but that places an emphasis on voter participation.

A basic Wisconsin value is under assault by those who would game the system for their partisan advantage.

Like Karl Rove, Jeff Stone doubts that Republicans can win high-turnout elections running on platforms that promise to serve the few rather than the many, and they are probably right. So they have turned to voter-suppression schemes to get their way on election day.

This sort of rank partisanship may work in Indiana, and perhaps even in the chambers of the less-enlightened members of the Supreme Court.

But it has no place in Wisconsin, where Robert M. La Follette wisely observed that the cure for what ails democracy is more democracy.

An editorial  —  5/07/2008 9:39 am