Скачать или смотреть Wisconsin Citizenship Crackdown

A Wisconsin judge just ordered election officials to verify the citizenship of every single registered voter in the state before the next election. All 3.6 million of them. In less than five months.

Waukesha County Judge Michael Maxwell ruled that the Wisconsin Elections Commission must cross-reference voter rolls with Department of Transportation records, which include citizenship status from driver's license applications.

The judge initially went further and barred clerks from registering any new voters without proof of citizenship. He walked that part back after the state appealed, but the verification mandate stands.

This is a solution in search of a problem. Noncitizen voting in Wisconsin is virtually nonexistent. We're talking about maybe a handful of cases over decades in a state with millions of voters.

But Republicans have been hammering this issue for years, convinced that hordes of undocumented immigrants are sneaking into polling places. There's no evidence for it. Study after study finds voter fraud of any kind is vanishingly rare.

What this ruling actually does is create chaos for election administrators. Wisconsin has same-day voter registration, which means people can register at the polls on election day. This system has worked for decades and drives high voter turnout.

Now clerks are supposed to verify citizenship for millions of existing voters while also handling same-day registrations. The Elections Commission says it's not even clear they have the legal authority or technical capability to do this.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell pointed out that the ruling conflicts with Wisconsin's election laws. The state has never required citizenship verification beyond the checkbox on the registration form where people attest under penalty of perjury that they're citizens.

The state is appealing. This will probably end up at the Wisconsin Supreme Court. But in the meantime, it's another front in the ongoing campaign to make voting harder under the guise of election security.

The ruling came from Waukesha County, one of the most Republican counties in Wisconsin. Judge Maxwell was appointed by a Republican governor. The case fits a familiar pattern of conservative judges in conservative counties issuing sweeping orders that affect the entire state.

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