The Andrew Goodman Foundation is suing the 6 members of the Wisconsin Elections Committee for restrictions imposed on the use of student IDs for voting. The law requires that a student ID include the issuance date, an expiration date of no more than 2 years from the date of issuance, and a signature. A voter who wishes to use a student ID must also independently prove current enrollment. No other forms of permissible identification are subject to these onerous requirements. The legal challenge was filed today in federal court and argues that these restrictions are intentionally designed to discriminate against student voters in violation of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which outlaws denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of age.
From 2012 to 2016, the state of Wisconsin, on average, had the largest decreases along with Georgia and Mississippi in student voting rates according to the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement by the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University. This data is consistent with a more general study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison that analyzed 2 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties and concluded that 16,800 to 23,250 voters in Dane and Milwaukee counties were deterred from casting ballots in the 2016 elections because of Wisconsin’s restrictions on eligible forms of identification….Click here to read the complaint.