All over the country, Republican legislatures and governors spent the last two years trying to make it harder to register to vote and harder to vote. They claimed that the laws they were enacting were intended to combat in-person voter fraud, where people show up at the polls and impersonate someone who they are not in order to cast more than one vote. Yet, they consistently failed to provide courts any evidence that this kind of fraud has occurred in more than a handful of cases over the last decade. Without question, they failed to show that even one election at any level of government was stolen through in-person voter fraud.
In addition, they sought to limit early voting. They cut the hours and days of early voting, and limited the places where people could vote early, which contributed to three, four, six, and seven hour lines both during early voting and on Election Day. These decisions were justified with spurious claims that they would save money.
All these efforts were transparently about limiting the percentage of people who could vote. When possible, they went further and designed campaigns that would disproportionately inconvenience, if not flat-out disenfranchise, Democratic voters. The state-issued photo ID requirements were an example of this. So were efforts to restrict voter registration efforts by third-party organizations like the League of Women Voters.
This is the context in which you should view Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s recent comments at the Ronald Reagan library. In 1971, Wisconsin became the first state to create same-day voter registration. By allowing citizens to show up at the polls (early, or on Election Day) and register to vote before casting a vote, the Badger State managed to have the second-highest turnout percentage in the country in 2008. A very respectable 72.4% of eligible Wisconsin citizens cast their ballots that year. It should be a cause for statewide civic pride. But the governor doesn’t see it that way.
“States across the country that have same-day registration have real problems because the vast majority of their states have poll workers who are wonderful volunteers, who work 13 hour days and who in most cases are retirees,” Walker said. “It’s difficult for them to handle the volume of people who come at the last minute. It’d be much better if registration was done in advance of election day. It’d be easier for our clerks to handle that. All that needs to be done.“
Yet, it was states like Ohio and Florida that restricted early voting that experienced long voting lines on Election Day, not states like Wisconsin with same-day registration. Governor Walker wants to eliminate a 41-year tradition of same-day registration in his state, not because it is overly taxing for volunteer poll workers, but because he doesn’t want to compete for 72.4% of the eligible votes in his state. He wants lower turnout. He wants much lower turnout. He’s no different in that regard from the Republican governors of Ohio or Pennsylvania or Florida who all went to extreme lengths to try to shrink the size of the electorate this time around, and all of whom failed to hand their state’s Electoral Votes to Mitt Romney.
We ought to have a national debate about what kind of electorate we want to have. Should it be restricted to white Christian men who own many acres of land? If not, why not? Because all these efforts to make it harder for everyone else to vote must be justified in some manner other than it helps the Republican Party win elections.
Right?