Voter ID amendment is a distraction from challenges to voter rights

In 2011, Gov. Scott Walker signed into law the requirement that voters had to show photo ID in order to vote.

Voter ID has survived legal challenges and has been the law of the land in every election in Wisconsin since 2016. Now, 14 years after it was passed, the Republican-led legislature under Robin Vos is asking for voters to make the law part of the Wisconsin constitution.

If the amendment passes, voters will have to show ID at the next election. If it fails, voters will have to show ID at the next election.

The debate isn’t so much about how voter ID requirements work to disenfranchise historically marginalized populations who may not have licenses or other forms of photo identification or that the voting system is fundamentally secure and actual voter fraud is exceedingly rare. All of those arguments have been made before and repeating them now would be simply talking to hear oneself talk. Voter ID is the law, and people have had to deal with it being the law for more than a decade.

The only debate at this point is the lack of consequences to the state legislature and Robin Vos for the monumental waste of time and money to bring it forward as a constitutional amendment.

What will be next, a constitutional amendment to declare autumn the nicest season of the year in Wisconsin or perhaps a constitutional amendment requiring people to stop at stop signs or yield to pedestrians at crosswalks? Although that last could potentially draw heated debate from latte chugging drivers who are late to work.

The real value to proponents of the Voter ID amendment is not so much that it will change anything about the law, but that it will rile up the base to believe that there is an attack on something they hold dear. In doing so, they work to get the voters out and donor money flowing for what has historically been a lower turnout election.

Beyond this, the farcical amendment has no other real purpose than to distract people from focusing on current legislation which, if passed in its current form, could present major obstacles for married women to register and vote if their current last name does not match the name on their birth certificate.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act has been gaining ground in Congress.

The legislation is based on the unfounded belief that non-citizens are voting in American elections. Their answer is to have every person registering to vote required to show proof of citizenship. This is easy to do if you have a passport, but only about 43% of Americans have one. Married women who took their spouse’s name would have to show additional documentation to prove they were actually who they say they are and are indeed citizens.

At best, this presents an increased burden and additional step to solve a nonexistent problem. When you take into account that poor people and minorities are more unlikely to have easy access to the documentation or be able to take off work to go to government offices to get them, at worst, this could result in wholesale disenfranchisement of women voters that reads like the prologue to a dystopian novel.

The best time to fix a bad law is before it passes and voters must call on their members of Congress to ensure that America does not accidentally, or intentionally, disenfranchise married women voters.

Rather than worrying about nonsensical bogeymen, bringing forward wasteful and unnecessary amendments to enshrine existing law, the legislature and public should instead be having debates on passing quality laws that address real issues rather than just those that play well with conservative focus groups.