Late in the day on Friday, just hours after hearing oral arguments, a three-judge federal appeals court panel allowed Wisconsin’s discriminatory voter ID law to be put in place just weeks before a hotly contested election.
Their decision is extraordinary—as is the voter ID law.
Although justice is supposed to be blind and nonpartisan, this law and decision are thoroughly partisan and unfair. For years, Republicans in Wisconsin and across the country created the myth of widespread voter fraud as a way to cast doubt on the integrity of our elections. There is no evidence supporting their argument, but that didn’t matter to them. They used this myth to develop voter ID requirements to create barriers for voters who usually vote Democratic—students, low-income voters, African American and Latino voters, and the elderly.
Republicans across the country implemented voter ID requirements under the guise of preventing still-unproven voter fraud. The GOP majority on the U.S. Supreme Court allowed them to do so and also stripped the landmark Voting Rights Act of much of its power, which also gives Republicans more freedom to discriminate against voters they don’t want to show up at the polls.
Still, Wisconsin had a good argument against the Scott Walker-backed voter ID law: Up to 300,000 qualified voters could be disenfranchised by it, far more people than the alleged fraudsters. This spring, after listening to much expert testimony, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman agreed with that assessment and shot down the many right-wing myths supporting voter ID.
On Friday, however, three appellate judges—all appointed by Republican presidents, including the George W. Bush-nominated Diane Sykes, an ex-wife of Charlie Sykes—came to the exact opposite conclusion and ordered that the discriminatory voter ID law be put in place for the Nov. 4 election.
Now, the state Government Accountability Board and local municipal clerks are struggling to implement it. The problem is that more than 11,000 absentee ballots were sent out before the decision and don’t require voter ID. And clerks and election workers have been trained without voter ID instructions.
So what will happen next? On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Advancement Project announced that they would ask the full 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review Friday’s decision by the three Republican appointees. This en banc hearing would involve about 10 judges in that court. This only happens in extraordinary cases, but if this case, which could disenfranchise up to 300,000 voters, isn’t extraordinary, then what is? There is also the potential for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court supported the voter ID law, so there is little room to push for an appeal here.
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Finally, another course of action is more direct, and that is to organize voters, who should be outraged by the three Republican judges’ hijacking of Wisconsin’s election.
The three Republican judges did a disservice to Wisconsin voters. They are supposed to preserve the integrity of our elections, not endorse a discriminatory scheme to disenfranchise voters just weeks before an election. Voter fraud isn’t gutting our faith in the system. Government-sanctioned voter suppression is.
