A series of Wisconsin voting restrictions signed into law by Gov. Scott Walker (R) are being challenged in lawsuit spearheaded by a lawyer associated with the Hillary Clinton campaign, MSNBC reported Monday.
The complaint, filed in federal court Friday, alleges, “These measures were intended to burden, abridge, and deny, and have had and will have the effect of burdening, abridging, and denying, the voting rights of Wisconsinites generally and of African-American, Latino, young, and/or Democratic voters in Wisconsin in particular.”
Since coming into office after the 2010 elections, Walker and his counterparts in the statehouse have passed a number of new regulations to voting procedures. The challengers in Friday’s complaint, which include get out the vote organizations and voters who say their franchise rights have been adversely impacted, suggest that the restrictions are an effort to curb the Wisconsin constituencies who voted for President Obama in droves in 2008 and 2012.
Marc Elias, an election law expert who is also general counsel to the Clinton campaign, filed the Wisconsin lawsuit. He filed a separate challenge last month to voting restrictions passed in Ohio under Republican Gov. John Kasich.
The Wisconsin complaint challenges a slew of election laws — most of them enacted under Walker — that include limitations to early voting, restrictions on voter registration, increases to residency requirements, restrictions to straight-ticket voting, absentee ballot restrictions, polling station requirements and stipulations that municipal clerks cannot return absentee ballots with mistakes to voters.
The laws are being challenged as a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as well as on various constitutional grounds.
Wisconsin’s 2011 voter ID law, considered one of the strictest in the nation, had been blocked by a federal court in a previous challenge, only to see that decision overturned at the appeals level. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court declined to review that case.
Read the full complaint below:
Will anyone be able to rein in these latest outrageous actions in the state of Sen. Joe McCarthy? Apparently, WI voters don’t want democratic government.
Corruption uber alles!
Waiting for the howls of anger from the nut-jobs over the unrestrained use of overturning properly passed and signed laws in the court system by the activist judiciary. Oh wait…never-mind
If Republicans cannot win elections the proper way, (by getting the majority of people to vote for them), then the only way to win is to stop some people from voting. And we all know whom the Republicans want to stop from voting. Scott Walker is the epitome of attempts to rig elections.
Virtually everything Walker proposes and does reeks of corruption.
Their Republican voter base, of older white and more ignorant voters, is both dying out and being replaced by younger people of color. So a major Republican strategy is to implement tactics that keep those new people, who tend to vote Democratic, keep them from voting at all. This isn’t a democracy of ideas, it’s a bought-and-paid-for process of keeping elites in power and steering the ship.