Asked by Charles Benson of WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) about GOP prospects this fall, the congressman said, "Well, I think Hillary Clinton is about the weakest candidate the Democrats have ever put up, and now we have photo ID and I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference as well."
And why is that? It's because the Republican thinking (and the Democratic fear) was that it might help suppress voting by minorities and students, who often vote for Democrats. That's certainly what a Republican legislative aide thought after a closed meeting in 2011, where voter ID was being discussed by legislators, including Grothman: "I was in the closed Senate Republican caucus when the final round of multiple voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of the GOP senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters," Todd Allbaugh wrote in a Facebook post. He reiterated those charges in a powerful interview with MSNBC Thursday night.
Grothman denies Allbaugh's charge but it's hard to draw any other conclusion. The issue was never fraud; it was always power, just as it was in Republican gerrymandering of legislative districts and their efforts to block government from public view and reduce governmental watchdogs.
But Republican hopes and Democratic fears may have been overblown, at least on voter ID, at least on Tuesday. Wisconsin had the highest voter turnout in a presidential primary in 44 years.
Voter ID rules appear to have done little to suppress voting in general. There were long lines in some places, especially near college campuses, and some people may have given up and gone home. But the evidence suggests that the vast majority of them stuck it out and voted, determined to exercise their rights as citizens. Good for them.
It also indicates that the problem of long lines is manageable. Some universities, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were equipped to deal with large numbers of students registering to vote at the polls; other polling stations were not. State authorities and all polling places need to have the staffing necessary to deal with same-day registration for citizens who bring their photo IDs and proof of residency.
The high turnout also shows that fraud was a bogus issue, and the voter ID law a bogus bill. All the scare stories about busloads of illegal voters being shipped in from out-of-state to swing an election were nonsense. Didn't happen. Investigation after investigation has uncovered minimal voter fraud — not nearly enough to change results. So the entire voter ID bill was an unnecessary exercise and just another phony political distraction from the real problems.
Citizens were not disenfranchised — because they refused to let the law disenfranchise them. Instead, the state wasted time and money on a phony issue, trumped up by talk radio, that has succeeded in doing absolutely nothing beyond inconveniencing those voters who have changed addresses in recent years, at certain voting stations that were poorly prepared to handle them.
We wonder if Grothman and his fellow Republicans who pushed through the voter ID law are proud of that legacy.