Source:
Milwaukee Journal SentinelMadison — Republicans on an Assembly committee approved a bill Tuesday to require people to show photo ID to vote, but Democrats ripped the measure because few if any existing college IDs could be used for voting.
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To make its IDs compliant with the requirements of the Assembly bill, the University of Wisconsin-Madison would have to put addresses on them. UW officials are reluctant to do that because the IDs include magnetic strips that open doors to dorm rooms, and students would be at risk of break-ins if they lost them.
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Two key Republican senators - Alberta Darling of River Hills and Joe Leibham of Sheboygan - said they did not want to allow any student IDs to be used for voting. Darling is co-chairwoman of the Joint Finance Committee, which will take up the bill Monday; Leibham sits on the committee and has worked for years on photo ID legislation.
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For months, Republicans declined to include college IDs as an acceptable form of ID for voting, but the Assembly committee agreed to allow IDs issued by accredited public and private universities and colleges in Wisconsin if they included a photo, signature, current address and date of birth. The IDs could be used only if they expired within four years of the election.
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Read more:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/121193979.html
Those additional requirements for student IDs if they're to be considered an acceptable form of ID for voting will in effect keep students from voting (since colleges won't meet them), which is obviously the intent.
And the bill in its entirety is designed to suppress voting by the poor, elderly, and minorities, as well as students, as Democratic Rep. Kelda Helen Roys pointed out. She told the Republicans that the bill was the "vaccine" they need to protect themselves and their jobs from the harm they're doing to the public.
This bill is part of a nationwide legislative push by the
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
The OP of the compilation topic on ALEC that the link in the paragraph above goes to links to a topic about this March article from Campus Progress, which refers to the Wisconsin legislation:
http://www.campusprogress.org/articles/conservative_corporate_advocacy_group_alec_behind_voter_disenfranchise/Conservative Corporate Advocacy Group ALEC Behind Voter Disenfranchisement Efforts
Posted by Tobin Van Ostern
March 8th, 2011
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In Wisconsin, where public attention now is focused on Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) efforts to undermine the rights of workers to engage in collective bargaining, there is another piece of proposed legislation that could have a substantial negative impact on the state’s young and minority voters. Conservative representatives in the state have proposed a law, backed by Walker, that would ban students from using in-state university- or college-issued IDs for proof-of-residency when voting. If this legislation became law, it would become one of the strictest voter registration laws in the country and would provide significant logistical and financial barriers for a variety of groups, including student and minority voters.
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ALEC’s efforts seem to be working. Out of the eight states that have legislators currently listed as members of the ALEC Public Safety and Elections task force, five are either considering or already have laws that were graded harmful to student voting. New Hampshire and Wisconsin, the two states currently considering the most extreme version of the law, both have ALEC members represented on the committees. And in Wisconsin, that member is Rep. Scott Suder (R-District 69), the state’s Majority Leader, who ushered the legislation through the Wisconsin State Assembly. That legislation includes provisions similar to the ALEC model legislation, which Campus Progress obtained from a source outside of ALEC. This copy shows that the model law was approved by the ALEC board of directors on Aug. 27, 2009.
(ALEC refused to distribute the model legislation to Campus Progress.ALEC spokesperson Raegan Weber* emailed, “Model legislation is a privilege of membership and therefore we don’t provide this publicly” -- a somewhat unusual practice by a non-profit public policy group organized under the Internal Revenue Service code as a 501(c)(3) charitable or educational group; most such organizations make public most fruits of their labors, rather than concealing it from people who aren’t members.)
ALEC spokesperson Weber stated that the group is “neutral” as to whether student IDs should count as an acceptable form of ID. However, the ALEC model legislation obtained by Campus Progress shows that it would indeed prohibit student IDs. Additionally, of the four states cited as positive examples for Voter ID by ALEC in June 2009, three would not consider student IDs an acceptable proof of residency. One of those four states is Indiana, and One Wisconsin Now, a progressive Wisconsin political organization, noted that, “The bill's authors, Republican Rep. Jeff Stone and Sen. Joe Leibham, have modeled their bill after Indiana's Voter ID law.”
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