Will Voter Suppression Skew Wisconsin Primary Results?

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Republican voter suppression turned Arizona's primary into a fiasco that forced people to wait in five-hour-long lines to vote. Many were turned away.

Wisconsin Republicans are also disenfranchising citizens with laws designed to discourage voting by groups that might vote for Democrats. As many as 300,000 voters could be turned away from voting. How will this affect Tuesday's primary?

Wisconsin Voter Suppression

Wisconsin Republicans have pushed through numerous laws designed to keep certain kinds of people from voting. These laws restrict voter registration; limit the places where people can vote; impose ID requirements that exclude student, veteran and other usually standard forms of ID; greatly reduce early voting hours, including completely eliminating early voting during non-working hours; require voters to stand in long lines at the motor vehicles' office for ID, and other suppression techniques.

To top it off, the law requires the state to run a public education campaign to help voters learn what they need to do to vote, but state Republicans refused to allocate the money for that campaign.

Just how does Wisconsin suppress voting? Jon Green at AMERICAblog sums it up nicely, writing, "The state has passed practically every 21st Century voting restriction we thought Republicans were capable of and then some."

-- Photo ID requirement for voting

-- Reducing early voting from 30 days to 12, while eliminating it entirely on evenings and weekends

-- Require proof of residence when registering to vote

-- Eliminated the certification of statewide voter registrars, meaning that anyone who registers others to vote can only do so in the county in which they're certified

-- Increased the residency requirement for voting from 10 days to 28 (excepting presidential elections)

-- Require that citizens who move within the state less than four weeks prior to an election vote in their old locality

-- Eliminated faxing and emailing of absentee ballots to anyone other than military or overseas voters

-- Prohibited municipal clerks from returning absentee ballots to citizens to fix mistakes on their forms

-- Required an area for poll monitors be set up between three and eight feet from the table where voters sign in