Nytimes elections 20173/21/2024 ![]() ![]() The impact of Wisconsin’s voter ID law received almost no attention. ![]() “To some, it was like having to choose between broccoli and liver.”Ī New Study Shows Just How Many Americans Were Blocked From Voting in Wisconsin Last Year “Perhaps the biggest drags on voter turnout in Milwaukee, as in the rest of the country, were the candidates themselves,” Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times wrote in a post-election dispatch that typified this line of analysis. This is where Clinton lost the state and, with it, the larger narrative about the election.Ĭlinton’s stunning loss in Wisconsin was blamed on her failure to campaign in the state, and the depressed turnout was attributed to a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate. In Anthony’s old district, where aging houses on quiet tree-lined streets are interspersed with boarded-up buildings and vacant lots, turnout dropped by 23 percent from 2012. Turnout fell only slightly in white middle-class areas of the city but plunged in black ones. More than half the state’s decline in turnout occurred in Milwaukee, which Clinton carried by a 77-18 margin, but where almost 41,000 fewer people voted in 2016 than in 2012. The state, which ranked second in the nation in voter participation in 20, saw its lowest turnout since 2000. On election night, Anthony was shocked to see Trump carry Wisconsin by nearly 23,000 votes. But they didn’t go to the polls because they knew their votes wouldn’t count. “It was their first election, and they were really excited to vote,” she said. “I felt like the right to vote was being stripped away from me.”Īnthony said her 19-year-old daughter and 21-year-old nephew, who didn’t drive regularly and had misplaced their licenses, were also stymied by the new law. “This particular election was very important to me,” she told me in the motel’s small lobby, citing her strong aversion to Donald Trump. She had recently moved to Madison for a job making sales calls for the health insurance company Humana and was living in an Econo Lodge off the freeway with two of her kids and her mother-in-law as she looked for permanent housing. I met Anthony on a rainy Wednesday evening in mid-August. For the first time in her life, her vote wasn’t counted. But Anthony couldn’t take time off from her job as an administrative assistant at a housing management company, and she had five kids and two grandkids to look after. It would be counted only if she went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a new ID and then to the city clerk’s office to confirm her vote, all within 72 hours of Election Day. The poll worker gave her a provisional ballot instead. Anthony couldn’t, and so she wasn’t able to vote. But this was Wisconsin’s first major election that required voters-even those who were already registered-to present a current driver’s license, passport, or state or military ID to cast a ballot. ![]() ![]() A poll worker confirmed she was registered to vote at her current address. She’d lost her driver’s license a few days earlier, but she came prepared with an expired Wisconsin state ID and proof of residency. ![]()
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