Schimel: Voter ID Gave Trump Win In State

Wisconsin Attorney General was on the air with a right wing squawker, bragging about the damaging effects of the state's draconian Voter ID law:

Election officials and Democrats in Wisconsin have repeatedly argued that the state’s strict voter ID law allowed Donald Trump to win the state in 2016 by keeping thousands of voters—predominantly in Democratic-leaning areas—from the polls. Now a top Republican official in the state is saying the same thing.

“We battled to get voter ID on the ballot for the November ’16 election,” Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, who defended the law in court, told conservative radio host Vicki McKenna on April 12. “How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Sen. [Ron] Johnson was going to win reelection or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?”

Of course, when sued, Schimel couldn't identify one case of voter fraud where voter ID would have stopped it.. Not one.

But it has been proven time and time again that the law did keep tens of thousands of Wisconsinites from the polls:

I don't know that this is the best thing for Schimel to brag about, especially when he's up for reelection this fall. Then again, he's been too busy being the top attorney for the Republicans and buying scads of swag to actually do his job, much less do it well. Otherwise, the state wouldn't be facing a backlog of thousands of untested rape kits.

Fortunately, he does have a very qualified opponent this year - Josh Kaul. Kaul is the son of the late former Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager and the lead attorneywho's been taking it to Schimel regarding the Voter ID laws:

Kaul's lawsuit challenged a broad swath of voting rules. In July 2016, a federal judge kept in place the requirement to show ID at the polls, but struck down a number of other laws, including restrictions on when and where early voting could occur.

Judge James Peterson found Wisconsin's voting laws discriminated against minorities and labeled the voter ID law "a cure worse than the disease" that tried to address "mostly phantom voter fraud." His ruling forced the state to make changes to the system it uses to issue IDs to those who have the most difficulty obtaining them, such as people who don't have birth certificates or Social Security numbers.

It's as they say, when people vote, Republicans lose. Schimel just verified that.