In March 2014, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker signed a bill limiting early voting in his state. The new law, aimed directly at suppressing the Democratic vote among urban minorities, limits in‐person absentee voting to no later than 7 p.m. on weeknights and prohibits weekend voting altogether. It could have been worse: Walker vetoed a portion of the bill that would have reduced early voting to no more than 45 hours a week. Instead, he opted to cap early voting at 55 hours, but the impact is essentially the same.
The new law outraged Wisconsin Democrats, who rightly fear it will suppress the vote in heavily Democratic Milwaukee and Madison. Indeed, some believe that if the law had been in place during the 2012 Presidential election, officials in Milwaukee would have had only 11 seconds to process each ballot submitted during early voting.
As Thinkprogress.org put it: “In 2016, the role of Florida – with its six hour voting lines in 2012 – could be played by Gov. Scott Walker’s state of Wisconsin….” This is the second time Walker has signed legislation to restrict early voting. In 2011, he signed a bill reducing early voting from three weeks to two and limiting it to just one weekend.
Of course, the issue of limiting voter hours is extremely significant because it exposes the Republican “Big Lie” about voter fraud: Limiting voting hours has no relationship to fraud. While Republicans claim their efforts to identify and purge supposedly ineligible voters are necessary to root out voter fraud, limiting voting hours for all has no such possible rationale: a person ineligible to vote on weekends, or any other now excluded voting hours, is just as ineligible to vote at 6:00pm on a weekday, or any other time still permitted for voting. Even where Republicans do not use the anti‐fraud campaign to justify the reduction in voting hours, however, they do so by professing the need to save money. How amazing it is that this desire to save money has arisen so suddenly and dramatically across Republican controlled states in 2013…the very year of the elimination of federal pre‐clearance and the re‐invigoration of Republican voter suppression agendas.