_and 15 percent voters with household income under $35,000 a year.
Now, don't add them up because there's a lot of double-counting here. "Poor," "black," and "young" go together like "stop" and "frisk."
But let's cut to the chase: the draconian ID law and other voting and registration restrictions passed in just the year before the 2012 election, according to the Brennan Center, are going to cost five million voters to lose their civil rights.
Overwhelmingly, the changes were made in 12 "battleground" states, with the most radical exclusion laws adopted in Florida and Wisconsin. The cheese-chewer state will require government-issued IDs to vote. But the IDs issued by the state itself to University of Wisconsin students won't be accepted. That's okay because, as a New Hampshire legislator, hoping to emulate Wisconsin, points out, "Kids, you know, just vote liberal."
Using a formula provided by the Brennan Center, we can calculate that 97,850 student voters were barred, turned away, blocked, challenged, or given provisional ballots (left uncounted) on recall Election Day in June. No U.S. paper listed Wisconsin as a "swing" state that month. Well, it swung.
Altogether, the 2012 changes in Wisconsin law were sufficient alone to account for the victory of Republican Governor Scott Walker in staving off a recall vote in June 2012. Walker did have the popular support of $31 million (versus $4 million raised by his Democratic opponent).
I note that Wisconsin voter registrations show a drop of 107,000 in the first six months of 2011 before a mass attack on the list by the GOP-controlled legislature. To get the latest figures is suspiciously difficult. We do know that registrations have been rejected en masse, in part by "matching" requirements used to verify registrations.
Despite the fact that Wisconsin has no known history of fictional or dead people actually voting, the cost to real, live voters is devastating.
**This is an excerpt from Greg Palast's latest book from Seven Stories Press: "Billionaires and Ballot Bandits: How to Steal An Election in 9 Easy Steps."
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