Wisconsin GOP Really Doesn’t Want You to Vote

Posted on March 6, 2012 at 5:20 pm by JM Ashby

Coming face to face with the reality that the next few election cycles in Wisconsin will spell bad news for the state Republican party, Scott Walker’s henchmen in the state legislature are doing everything they can to suppress the vote.

First they implemented a voter suppression ID law which is currently being challenged in court, and now they’re targeting the inconvenient procedure of registering soon-to-be college freshmen which, as the GOP presidential candidates have informed us, usually go on to become liberal snobs.

Madison – The Wisconsin state Assembly is scheduled to vote on a bill that would remove a requirement in state law that voter registration be offered to students in high school.

The measure passed on a party line vote in the Senate last month with all Republicans in support and all Democrats opposed. The Republican-controlled Assembly was to take it up Tuesday.

[...] Republicans say high school students have many other options for registering and it’s a burden for elections officials to offer it at the schools.

Oh. Registering people to exercise their voting rights is such a burden. Woe is me.

If providing voter registration at educational institutions is no longer required by law, it probably won’t be provided because that costs money. And if there’s anything our educational institutions are looking for right now it’s ways to cut spending without touching presidential salaries or athletic programs.

Of course the gravity of the situation is compounded by the fact that Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled state legislature cut over 800 million dollars from the state’s education budget, or roughly $600 per student.

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  • http://drangedinaz.wordpress.com/ IrishGrrrl

    And conveniently the young voted for the President in a big way….just another way they try to steal elections.

  • muselet

    Ashby, you already called this out, but:

    Republicans say high school students have many other options for registering and it’s a burden for elections officials to offer it at the schools.

    Huh? Seriously, huh? What kind of burden could it possibly be to offer voter registration at high schools? Once a week, you send someone from the office around to the high schools to pick up completed forms and drop of a stack of new ones at the front office. That’s a burden to elections officials? Isn’t that somewhere in the job description?

    *facepalm*

    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now: they’re not even trying any more.

    –alopecia

  • Brutlyhonest

    This voter suppression is another coordinated avenue of attack among the state governments controlled by wingnuts.

    Colbert had a segment last week about a teacher in Pace, FL getting fined for turning in voter registration forms late – FL changed the law to make it harder in the name of stopping voter fraud (which Colbert cited as .ooo4 % [I think it was only 3 zeroes]. The sweaty, old, white-guy legislator that sponsored the law said the law was needed to get out ahead of any fraud.

    Here in VA, they also passed a couple of suppression laws to prevent fraud. Funny thing is, the only instances of attempted fraud were a couple of GOP candidates teams’ trying to get them on the primary ballot with fraudulent signatures. Double funny: the only reason tehy were caught in the act was a law passed by the Rs in an attempt to suppress Ds!