A federal district court refused to expand the kinds of identification voters can use in Wisconsin Tuesday, rejecting the arguments made by a special interest group that aimed to make voting easier for students, veterans and people with out-of-state driver’s licenses.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against Wisconsin’s voter ID law earlier this year, claiming the law was unconstitutional due to its limitations.
The ACLU asked the court Oct. 5 to expand the law to include IDs for veterans, IDs for technical college students and out-of-state driver’s licenses. They argued the law arbitrarily excluded those classes of people.
District Judge Lynn Adelman rejected the ACLU’s arguments in his decision. Adelman explained that a line must be drawn between acceptable and unacceptable forms of ID, otherwise the state would have to create and maintain an infinite list.
Adelman believed the logistics of expanding the list of acceptable forms of ID could hinder the state’s capability of administering the law, but also conceded the state could have added veteran’s IDs to the list.
“To be sure, Wisconsin probably could have included veteran’s ID on the list … without significantly increasing its administrative burden,” Adelman said in his opinion. “However … the state had to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of ID somewhere.”
The ACLU addressed Adelman’s decision, especially in regards to veteran’s IDs, as upsetting.
“It’s unconscionable that even veterans, who have so valiantly served our country, can’t use their government-issued IDs under this law,” Director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project Dale Ho said in the release.
Plaintiffs also argued the law violated the Equal Protection Clause, saying the law is currently unclear on whether voters can use technical college IDs. However, because the Government Accountability Board has interpreted the law to allow these IDs and no challenges to the interpretation have been made, Adelman declared the argument “unripe.”
The argument to allow out-of-state driver’s licenses was also discounted. Adelman said the plaintiffs did not convince him that a substantial amount of people are affected by this part of the law.
Ho said in the release that the ACLU is already looking for alternate avenues to expand options for voter identification.
