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Senate Bill Would Limit Early Absentee Voting Hours

ACLU Concerned About Unfairly Restricting Access To Polls

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Early voters line up in Madison during the 2012 presidential election.
Early voters line up in Madison during the 2012 presidential election. Photo: Emily Mills (CC-BY-ND)

Opponents of SB324, a bill that would curtail absentee voting hours, say the measure is an attack on large urban areas like Milwaukee. The bill is scheduled for action in the state Senate Tuesday.

The Republican-backed legislation would limit early voting to 45 hours per week on weekdays only for the two weeks before an election. Weekend voting would no longer take place.

In the 2012 presidential election, 35,000 people in Milwaukee voted early: all of them had to come downtown to the city’s municipal building or City Hall.

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Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett says by trying to cut back early voting hours, it appears Republicans want to frustrate people into not voting.

“The goal is to just jam up the city of Milwaukee and other large municipalities,” Barrett said. “Let’s just jam it up and have people frustrated and leave the polls.”

Barrett says he’s asked the state for approval to expand the number of early absentee voting sites in his city of 600,000 people, based on much smaller communities having one site, and Republicans wanting uniformity of opportunity to vote early.

Other GOP efforts over the last few years to limit voting, such as requiring voter ID, have been held up by courts. Chris Ahmuty of the ACLU of Wisconsin says there may be legal problems with restricting early voting in urban areas.

“It’s going to have a disparate impact on African-Americans and other minority voters. The ACLU has great problems with that,” Ahmuty said. “There’s a racial element to it; let’s not kid ourselves.”

Senate action is scheduled for Tuesday. The state Assembly has already passed a slightly different absentee voting measure.