3. Approving a law of this magnitude less than two months before a major election is certain to cause electoral chaos. Wisconsin’s voter ID law has been blocked since March 2012—in four different lawsuits in state and federal court.
Nine percent of Wisconsin’s electorate lacks a government-issued ID, compared to Indiana, where 99 percent of registered voters had ID.
Even if these hundreds of thousands of voters possess the underlying documentation to obtain a voter ID—like a birth certificate (seven witnesses at the trial didn’t have access to theirs)—they’d still have trouble getting one.
According to an amicus brief filed by One Wisconsin Now, 257,000 voting-age Wisconsinites don’t have a car in their household. Moreover, only thirty-three of Wisconsin’s ninety-two DMVs are open full-time during business hours. Wisconsin is very different from Indiana in that respect, notes the brief:
41 [DMVs] are open just two days each week, seven are open just a few hours for one day each month, and three are open just one day every quarter.… Only one DMV service center in the entire state of Wisconsin is open on a Saturday. No other DMV in the entire state operates in the evenings or on weekends.
Nearly all of Indiana’s 140 BMVs are open five days a week, Wisconsin has only 33 full-time sites; Indiana has 124 that are open on the weekends, Wisconsin has one.
According to the DMV website, the 92 DMV service centers are open for a combined total of approximately 9000 hours per month. If the 330,000 electors [without ID] attempted to obtain their ID during the one-month period preceding the election, the DMV would need to process on average 37 eligible electors each hour, every day of operation for the entire month.