NAACP Joins Already Crowded Field of Lawsuits Against Wisconsin Voter Suppression Law

Joining the League of Women Voters and the Wisconsin ACLU, the Milwaukee NAACP and Voices De La Frontera file suit against Act 23, the so-called “Voter ID” law.

We will challenge Act 23 because it disenfranchises scores of thousands of qualified African-American voters.   About half of all African-Americans in Milwaukee currently lack a driver’s license.   This new law is tantamount to a denial of the right to vote for many otherwise qualified voters.  There has never been a single prosecution or conviction of a Wisconsin voter misrepresenting his or her identity at the polls.   This law is nothing but vote suppression of minority voters.

This law, which does nothing to ensure the integrity of the voter rolls, is designed with the specific purpose of disenfranchising poor and elderly voters.  And in that sense, it’s working as designed.

Twelve voters who have been forced to incur unreasonable amounts of time and expense attempting to obtain their photo IDs are also plaintiffs in the NAACP/Voces lawsuit. The individual plaintiffs have spent many days traveling and waiting at various government agencies.

Plaintiff Mary McClintock is a wheelchair-bound elector who had to take three trips via para-transit vans to the downtown DMV offices to obtain her photo ID to vote. Ms. McClintock stated: “I have voted in every election that I can remember. This is crazy that I would have to make three separate trips downtown just to be able to do what I have been doing my entire life.”