Tag Archives: Voter ID

I was able to attend Thursday’s voter photo identification law information session at South Milwaukee’s City Hall, and I was glad I did.

I learned quite a bit from the presentation from the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board.

Of course, the most-publicized major impact of the law is probably its most controversial: Voters must show a photo ID in order to vote beginning this year. And all voters must sign a poll list before being issued a ballot.

Other mandates, however, were more of a surprise to me. Among them:

• The residency requirement — the time someone must live at their current address before voting — has changed from 10 days to 28 consecutive days.
• Voter registration is no longer a year-round option. Registration now “closes” for a short window — from 5 p.m. on the Friday before election day to the day of the day of the election — for each election. This allows for clerks’ offices to prepare their voter lists. Registration then reopens at the polls.
• Voters will no longer be able to select a straight-party ticket. Instead, each candidate must be selected individually.
• Absentee voting is also being changed. The window for in-person absentee voting is shrinking, as it now begins the third Monday before the election and ends at 5 p.m. on the Friday before election day. Photo ID must be provided. Ballots received by mail will be made available sooner.

In the end, I support the new law, which will clearly bring some major changes to how we vote in Wisconsin. The new requirements are reasonable and provide good safeguards to further protect the integrity of the vote.

But I also have this message: Be patient at the polls.

The ID and signature requirements will slow down the voting process, no question about it. Tests done by the GAB showed it took at least 20 seconds per voter to accomplish these tasks — and when you multiply that by hundreds, if not thousands, of voters that you’ll see during high-turnout elections like the upcoming presidential primary and gubernatorial recall and it’s significant.

South Milwaukee poll workers — who comprised most of the approximately 30 people in attendance on Thursday, as the meeting was presented by the city clerk’s office — do their best, but there is a learning curve for them, too, with the new voting rules. Please keep that in mind.