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Judge Strikes Down Wisconsin Voter ID Laws

HeadlineAug 01, 2016

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, a federal judge has overturned similar election laws there, finding they disenfranchised voters of color and were tailored to benefit the Republican politicians who enacted them. U.S. District Judge James Peterson wrote in his opinion, “The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities.” Peterson did not overturn a photo ID provision for voters in the state, but called the current system for issuing IDs a “wretched failure” that predominantly affected African-American and Latino citizens. On Friday, a court also ruled against Republican voting laws in Kansas, where a county judge said the state must count votes cast by people who registered without providing citizenship documents. Those decisions all come a week after a similar ruling against a voter ID law in Texas. We’ll have more on the rulings after headlines.

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