MILWAUKEE — All Voting is Local Wisconsin State Director Shauntay Nelson issued the following statement in response to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision that creates burdensome barriers to the ballot including: reduces early voting from six weeks to two, establishes a requirement that voters be Wisconsin residents for at least 28 days before an election, and prevents voters from having absentee ballots emailed or faxed to them.
“The court’s decision is a shameful effort to silence Wisconsin voters by codifying needless obstacles to voting, which have been shown repeatedly to disenfranchise Black and Latino Wisconsinites and people with disabilities. Voters in Wisconsin stood in tragically long lines to cast a ballot during the April primary. The COVID-19 pandemic and the chaos from the primary should have been a moment of reckoning for our state and moved decisionmakers to make it easier to vote, not harder. Instead, this decision only intensifies the harm to voters who are still reeling from being abandoned by the courts and state officials. This is no way to run a democracy.
“The only bright spot in this decision is a provision that upholds a lower court’s ruling allowing students to use expired IDs to vote. But we refuse to applaud courts agreeing with commonsense orders. We will continue to fight for all Wisconsinites until every voice is heard.”
BACKGROUND:
Three Republican-appointed federal judges made the unanimous decision– three and half years after the appeals court first heard arguments in February 2017.