Assembly committee’s passage follows party lines
By Patrick Marley of the Journal Sentinel
By Patrick Marley of the Journal Sentinel
May 3, 2011
Madison — Republicans on an Assembly committee approved a bill Tuesday to require people to show photo ID to vote, but Democrats ripped the measure because few if any existing college IDs could be used for voting.
Republicans who control the Legislature plan to pass the measure as early as next week. GOP Gov. Scott Walker supports requiring photo ID to vote.
To make its IDs compliant with the requirements of the Assembly bill, the University of Wisconsin-Madison would have to put addresses on them. UW officials are reluctant to do that because the IDs include magnetic strips that open doors to dorm rooms, and students would be at risk of break-ins if they lost them.
The Assembly Committee on Elections and Campaign Reform approved the bill 5-3 along party lines. Republicans said they expect changes to the bill before it becomes law.
Two key Republican senators - Alberta Darling of River Hills and Joe Leibham of Sheboygan - said they did not want to allow any student IDs to be used for voting. Darling is co-chairwoman of the Joint Finance Committee, which will take up the bill Monday; Leibham sits on the committee and has worked for years on photo ID legislation.
The Assembly bill also would move the partisan primary from September to August, eliminate straight party voting for most people and sharply limit when people could vote in clerks' offices in the run-up to an election.
During debate on the bill in the Assembly committee, Rep. Kelda Helen Roys (D-Madison) said the bill would have no effect on voter fraud while disenfranchising the poor, elderly, minorities and students - and thus give Republicans an advantage.
"It's the vaccine that you need in order to protect yourself and your jobs from the harm you're doing to the public," she told Republicans.
But Rep. Jeff Stone (R-Greendale), the bill's author, said the bill was a reasonable way to fix Wisconsin elections, which he called "the most open and vulnerable elections of any state."
For months, Republicans declined to include college IDs as an acceptable form of ID for voting, but the Assembly committee agreed to allow IDs issued by accredited public and private universities and colleges in Wisconsin if they included a photo, signature, current address and date of birth. The IDs could be used only if they expired within four years of the election.
IDs issued by UW-Madison, as well as most if not all other UW schools, do not include addresses, signatures or dates of birth. The UW-Madison cards expire five years after they are issued. Marquette University's ID cards do not include addresses, signatures, birth dates or expiration dates.
All eight states that require photo IDs to vote allow college IDs, and none of the standards for those IDs is as strict as the ones proposed in Wisconsin, said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political scientist. Some of the states do not allow IDs from private schools, however, he said.
In addition to certain student IDs, also eligible for voting purposes would be Wisconsin driver's licenses, state-issued ID cards, military IDs, passports, naturalization certificates or IDs issued by Native American tribes based in Wisconsin.
The state Department of Transportation would provide free IDs - but not driver's licenses - to those who asked for them, a provision included in the bill to ensure the ID requirement did not amount to an unconstitutional poll tax.
Providing the IDs would cost taxpayers $2.7 million a year. The Government Accountability Board, which runs elections, would need an additional $2.1 million.
The bill would go into effect in 2012. For elections before then, voters would be asked to produce photo ID. If they did not have ID, they would still be allowed to vote but would be told that ID would be required starting next year.
The measure could prevent people from voting in another's name, but not the most common form of voter fraud - felons voting while on state supervision.
The state Department of Justice and Milwaukee County district attorney's office have prosecuted 20 cases of voter fraud from the November 2008 election. None involved people voting in someone else's name at the polls.
The bill also would move the partisan primary from the second Tuesday in September to the second Tuesday in August. That change is being made to ensure Wisconsin complies with a federal law meant to ensure military and overseas voters have enough time to receive and return their ballots.
But Kevin Kennedy, the director of the Government Accountability Board, warned the Assembly committee in a letter Tuesday that the bill does not make other changes for military voters that are required under federal law.
