A federal judge in Milwaukee on Tuesday threw out Wisconsin’s voter ID law, saying it unconstitutionally puts too great a burden on people who do not have the required identification to vote.
U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman also found the law passed in 2011 violates the federal Voting Rights Act, discriminating against black and Latino voters, who are more likely not to have photo IDs or the documents required to get them.
Republican state legislators and Gov. Scott Walker had argued that the law was necessary to stop voter fraud, but Adelman, ruling in two legal challenges that he considered together, found that he had seen almost no evidence of it.
“The evidence at trial established that virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin,” he wrote. “The defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin
at any time in the recent past.”
“While there is no way to know how many of the 300,000 people who lack the acceptable photo ID will be deterred from voting because of the law,” Adelman wrote, “it is absolutely clear that Act 23 will prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes.”