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  • 2016-11-14 (xsd:date)
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  • 300,000 Wisconsin Voters 'Turned Away' Due to Voter ID Laws? (en)
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  • On 10 November 2016, journalist Dan Arel published a tweet claiming Donald Trump had won the state of Wisconsin by 27,000 votes, adding that 300,000 Wisconsin voters were turned away by the state's voter identification laws: Many social media users sought citations for both claims (one involving the margin of Trump's Wisconsin victory, and the other the number of voters purportedly turned away). As of 14 November 2016, Trump's votes in Wisconsin were tallied at 1,409,427 to Hillary Clinton's 1,382,210 (a margin of 27,257 votes): That figure made it into a New York Times article about voter identification laws and their effects on voting outcomes, but the far more attention-grabbing 300,000 voters being denied at the polls part did not. When asked about a source for those numbers, Arel tweeted: The article Arel cited claimed that: The piece in turn linked to a 29 September 2016 article on the same web site about the difficulty of obtaining voter identification in the state of Wisconsin, but nowhere in that article did the 300,000 number appear. A second link led to a 29 April 2014 Wisconsin court ruling against voter ID laws: A section of that ruling gauged that roughly 300,000 registered voters in Wisconsin did not possess sufficient identification to vote at the time that the ruling was issued in April 2014, but it did not suggest that all 300,000 had tried and failed to vote at any point: The courts found not that 300,000 people were actively turned away as of April 2014, but rather that that number of registered voters possibly faced what the court deemed to be undue burdens obtaining the necessary identification to vote: On 26 October 2016, the New York Times provided updated information about voter ID laws in Wisconsin. Although some barriers to voting remain, the paper found many of the controversial provisions had been overturned: The 300,000 figure originated with a court's estimate of how many voters were potentially impacted by a voter ID law as it stood in April 2014, but by October 2016, changes had been made to that law. Moreover, even if the 300,000 figure was an accurate estimate of Wisconsin residents who back in 2014 possibly could not vote because they did not have the correct identification, that number was not a head count of residents who actually did (or would have) set out to vote on 8 November 2016 only to be turned away. (en)
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