It’s an instructive accident that on the day Sterling was bounced, Judge Lynn Adelman of the U.S. District Court in Milwaukee delivered a careful, comprehensive 90-page ruling tossing out Wisconsin’s voter identification law. In language more reserved than I am about to use, Adelman’s painstaking analysis concluded that the actual fraud is the idea that voter impersonation at the polls is a problem. It’s not.
“It is absolutely clear,” the judge wrote, that the law “will prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes.” The main result of voter ID requirements is to erect barriers between lower-income voters, who are disproportionately members of minority groups, and the ballot box.
Voter ID, in other words, takes straight aim at Americans whose clout in our political system is already limited, and tries to reduce it further.