More media focus on voter suppression WI knows too well

Props to Mother Jones for informing a national audience that Scott Walker's Voter ID law suppressed the 2016 election day turnout in Wisconsin and helped tip the outcome to Donald Trump. 

The state, which ranked second in the nation in voter participation in 2008 and 2012, saw its lowest turnout since 2000. More than half the state’s decline in turnout occurred in Milwaukee, which Clinton carried by a 77-18 margin, but where almost 41,000 fewer people voted in 2016 than in 2012...This is where Clinton lost the state and, with it, the larger narrative about the election.  

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...

“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.”

But it is frustrating and galling to point out that this is not a new story.

It is frustrating and galling to point out that Wisconsin has known all too well the consequences of Walker and his allies contorted into law were predictable.

So frustrating and galling because the motives behind the voter suppressionistic tactics referenced by Mother Jones and Milwaukee election director Albrecht referenced were obvious to anyone who was paying attention when Republicans took control of the state after the November, 2010 elections.

I wrote at the time: 

Scott Fitzgerald wants voter photo ID because he knows there has been phantom voting by people using multiple ballots.

How does he know this?

The fortune teller who brings his weekly delivery of magic beans heard it from a unicorn - - and that's how legislation will be written in the new Legislature.

The newspaper finds his claim false.

Will this dissuade Fitzgerald from codifying voter photo ID, banning same-day registration and other voting suppression schemes designed to tamp down turnout in Democratic student and low-income wards?

Not a chance. Like the Amtrak like from Milwaukee to Madison that Scott Walker killed purportedly over the annual operating costs, voter photo ID and the related legislation is not about facts.

It's all about partisan advantage and power politics.

Opponents of Walker's Voter ID and the partisan mythology on which it was purportedly based tried over the years to frame the law as voter suppression; I find the phrase showing up 98 times on my blog, as this 2016 example again notes: 

National media reports show Wisconsin GOP led voting suppression 

[Updated from 3:26 p.m., 10/26] State officials ordered by federal judge to find ID-seekers improperly turned away at DMV offices; federal election oversight sought. 

[Updated from 5:30 p.m., 10/25] Our intentionally-corrupted state with Scott Walker at the helm is leading the news today. 

From The New York Times: 

And today, separately from a story spreading across the Internet originating with discoveries made by One Wisconsin Institute and published in The Nation: 

Walker policies and allies are throughout these stories.
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Updated with past articles: 

*  Behind closed doors, Republicans were giddy over voter ID's partisan opportunities. 

*  In a separate interview, Glenn Grothman, a former Wisconsin GOP state senator promoted to the US Congress said the voter ID law would help a Republican presidential candidate win Wisconsin this November. 

And Wisconsin Republicans and their allies have acknowledged using suppressionist laws and tactics for partisan benefit: 

Deep in a trove of leaked documents made public this week was the latest example of Republican candor over voter ID laws — this time in Wisconsin. 

There, as a tight race for election to the state’s Supreme Court came to a close in April 2011, conservative leaders wondered aloud how to respond should Justice David Prosser Jr. — a reliable opponent of legal challenges to the agenda of Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican — go down in defeat. 

A senior vice president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce, Steve Baas, had a thought. “Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number?” he wrote in an email on April 6 to conservative strategists. “I obviously think we should.”

MADISON, Wis. — It seemed a clear victory for voting rights advocates in July when a federal court invalidated much of Wisconsin’s restrictive elections law, concluding that it discriminated against minorities by requiring voters to produce photo ID cards that blacks and Latinos too often lack. The remedy was straightforward: Henceforth, the state was to “promptly issue a credential valid as a voting ID to any person” who applied for one. 

But this month when Treasure Collins visited one of the Wisconsin motor vehicle offices that issue IDs, she found something entirely different.

A City Clerk Opposed an Early-Voting Site at UW–Green Bay Because ‘Students Lean More Toward the Democrats’