News & Commentary

Congress finally had enough. Almost one year after the first disclosure about the NSA's abusive surveillance programs, the House Judiciary Committee made history on Wednesday when it

More than a month after the Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team reported the state is using at least one Stingray device to track Wisconsin residents’ cellphones, the state Department of Justice still won’t discuss use of the technology — or even acknowledge having it.

Crossposted from the Election Law Blog.  Here is a guest post from Karyn Rotker, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU of Wisconsin (lead counsel in Frank v Walker).  It responds to an RNLA post on voter fraud in Wisconsin, and more broadly on my response to the RNLA on whether fear of impersonation fraud justifies voter id laws

Video: The ACLU lawyer discusses the group's victory in court this week over the voter ID law.

A federal judge struck down Wisconsin's new voter identification law last week, ruling that the law violated the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution as well as Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits states from imposing a voting qualification that "results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color." In his ruling, District Judge Lynn Adelman found that Wisconsin did not sufficiently prove that voter fraud exists. "The evidence at trial established that virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin," wrote Adelman. "The defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past." The judge also found that the law unjustifiably targeted minority voters, who were less likely to have qualifying identification than whites, and would result in less opportunities for minorities to participate in the political process. This result would be particularly troublesome given Judge Adelman's finding that "the disproportionate impact of the photo ID requirement results from the interaction of the requirement with the effects of past or present discrimination." Commenting on the ruling, Dale Ho, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Voting Rights Project, said, "This is a warning to other states that are trying to make it harder for citizens to vote." He continued, "This decision put them on notice that they can't tamper with citizens' fundamental right to cast a ballot. The people, and our democracy, deserve and demand better." The ACLU, the ACLU of Wisconsin, the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty and Dechert LLP argued the Wisconsin case at trial.

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.

This week's federal court decision to strike down Wisconsin's polling place Photo ID law has national significance and does not bode well for Republicans who have been attempting to advance such electoral schemes in recent years, as based on misleading "facts", wild claims and dishonest interpretations of case law and court precedent.

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed three defendants from the American Civil Liberties Union’s lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s Marriage Amendment, though the ACLU did not oppose dismissal of two of them.

Madison — A federal judge on Wednesday kept alive a challenge to the state's gay marriage ban, but dismissed two prosecutors and the state's top tax official from the case.