Scott Walker's New Restrictive Voting Laws Challenged By Top Clinton Lawyer

By TIERNEY SNEED Published JUNE 1, 2015, 4:09 PM EDT 8644 Views

A series of Wisconsin voting restrictions signed into law by Gov. Scott Walker (R) are being challenged in lawsuit spearheaded by a lawyer associated with the Hillary Clinton campaign, MSNBC reported Monday.

The complaint, filed in federal court Friday, alleges, "These measures were intended to burden, abridge, and deny, and have had and will have the effect of burdening, abridging, and denying, the voting rights of Wisconsinites generally and of African-American, Latino, young, and/or Democratic voters in Wisconsin in particular."

Since coming into office after the 2010 elections, Walker and his counterparts in the statehouse have passed a number of new regulations to voting procedures. The challengers in Friday's complaint, which include get out the vote organizations and voters who say their franchise rights have been adversely impacted, suggest that the restrictions are an effort to curb the Wisconsin constituencies who voted for President Obama in droves in 2008 and 2012.

Marc Elias, an election law expert who is also general counsel to the Clinton campaign, filed the Wisconsin lawsuit. He filed a separate challenge last month to voting restrictions passed in Ohio under Republican Gov. John Kasich.

The Wisconsin complaint challenges a slew of election laws -- most of them enacted under Walker -- that include limitations to early voting, restrictions on voter registration, increases to residency requirements, restrictions to straight-ticket voting, absentee ballot restrictions, polling station requirements and stipulations that municipal clerks cannot return absentee ballots with mistakes to voters.

The laws are being challenged as a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as well as on various constitutional grounds.

Wisconsin's 2011 voter ID law, considered one of the strictest in the nation, had been blocked by a federal court in a previous challenge, only to see that decision overturned at the appeals level. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court declined to review that case.

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