Update -- On Friday federal district court Judge James Peterson demanded the state investigate the DMV's implementation of Voter ID and the ID process. The state must produce a report by Oct. 7. At the same time the state ACLU filed a motion in the 7th District Court alleging that the state is not giving ID's to people who request them. This is a lot of litigation and expense to solve a problem that does not exist.
I try to keep track of these things - but if you were to ask me exactly what the status is of getting an ID to vote in Wisconsin if you cannot come up with, for example, a birth certificate, I'd have trouble remembering what today's story is. The state has been scrambling to find some sort of way to more-or-less conform to court rulings on voter ID while still managing to in practice make it hard to get those ID's.
According to a new story in The Nation, it sounds like they are succeeding admirably as people try to continue to go through the voter ID hoops, only to find that apparently nobody at the DMV offices actually understands the current rules, and even if they do understand the rules they are not very good at carrying them out.
Legal experts say they’re extremely troubled by the state’s continued failure to fairly enforce the voter-ID law. “Wisconsin has promised the court that voters would be able to get an ID with whatever documents they have,” says Sean Young of the ACLU. “They’ve completely failed to live up to that promise.”