On April 1, Wisconsin voters elected Susan Crawford to the state supreme court, maintaining the court’s 4-3 liberal majority. The race was highly publicized due to the role the court will play in congressional redistricting going into the 2026 and 2028 elections.
However, while Democrats celebrated Crawford’s 10-point victory, voting rights took a major hit as voters overwhelmingly voted for a referendum enshrining Wisconsin’s pre-existing voter ID laws into their state constitution.
Laws requiring identification documents in order to vote are not unique to Wisconsin. In 2025, only 16 states and Washington, D.C. do not require some sort of identification to vote, one of them being Minnesota.
Accordingly, Minnesota also has the highest voter turnout of any U.S. state.
Lilly Sasse, campaign director for We Choose Us, a Minnesota coalition dedicated to protecting voter rights, said Minnesota’s pro-voter policies, like same-day voter registration, pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds and no ID requirements, have contributed to high voter turnout.
“Having all of those things signal to people that we want our elections to be accessible,” Sasse said. “Here are ways (of) removing the barriers of access for voters.”
Voter ID laws seem like common sense on paper. After all, identification is required for trivial tasks like buying alcohol. In practice, voter ID laws exclude voters without access to a photo ID from voting entirely. Additionally, the stated purpose of ID laws, preventing fraud, is immaterial, considering voter fraud is exceedingly rare in U.S. elections.
Most importantly, Voter ID laws disproportionately impact non-white and poor voters. One study found that 21% of Black adults and 23% of Hispanic adults lack a valid driver’s license, compared to 12% of all U.S. adults. Fees accompany acquiring IDs, which lower-income individuals may be unable to pay.
“We don’t need things like voter ID in order to be able to prove we are who we say we are,” Sasse said.
Now that the House of Representatives passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, these concerns have become more salient.
Under the SAVE Act, voters would be required to present proof of citizenship to vote — either a birth certificate or passport. These requirements are far more onerous than most state voter ID requirements, which typically count driver’s licenses, REAL IDs and military IDs as valid identification.
According to the Center for American Progress, more than 2.4 million citizens do not have valid passports in Minnesota alone, and more than 1.2 million women have last names that do not match their birth certificates. Additionally, 80% of U.S. adults earning $50,000 or less a year lack a valid passport.
For someone whose current name does not match their birth certificate, they must provide a valid passport in order to vote. Obtaining a valid passport can cost up to $160.
There’s no beating around the bush: this is a modern poll tax.
Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera, executive director of Common Cause Minnesota, said the SAVE Act would have an impact on not only historically disenfranchised voters but also on active-voter demographics, like older, white Americans.
“These are people who have been married for I don’t know how many years, and now they gotta cough up a birth certificate,” Belladonna-Carrera said. “Do they have internet? What if they’re greater Minnesota? Do you have to mail in for the forms, get them, fill them out, mail them out, wait, get the documents, come back and then who do you mail it to?”
Minnesota has proven that the secret to high voter turnout is making the voting and registration process as easy as possible. The SAVE Act does the opposite.
“It undermines a democratic process,” Belladonna-Carrera said. “And a democratic process is founded on the values and ideals that we should have free, fair and safe elections. Not jumping through all these hoops.”
Ironically, though this legislation is being pushed by Republicans in Congress, the law would have a disproportionate impact on some of the Republicans’ key demographics.
Pew Research found Republican women are half as likely to keep their last name after marriage, increasing the odds that their current name does not match their birth certificate.
Since the SAVE Act’s provisions would eliminate mail-in and online registration — systems that 10% of Minnesotans use — rural voters, who are typically Republican, would need to drive farther distances to election offices to register. Writers from the Center for American Progress studied various Western counties and found that the rural Americans living furthest from their election office would have to drive up to 260 miles.
The significant impact on conservative strongholds may seem counterintuitive until you realize these voter suppression tactics are not designed to just keep Democrats from voting — they are meant to destroy the democratic process entirely.
Belladonna-Carrera said Common Cause Minnesota is nonpartisan rather than bipartisan, as they fight for voting rights for all Americans regardless of political affiliation.
“We work in the interests of everyday Minnesotans,” Belladonna-Carrera said. “It doesn’t matter whether the right to vote that we’re protecting are (from) some of the same people that are working actively to dismantle our democracy.”
Sasse said students should contact Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Sen. Tina Smith and renounce the SAVE Act and its implications.
“They always need more backup, to be hearing from constituents that this is not something we want,” Sasse said.
With the far-reaching effects of the SAVE Act on both sides of the political aisle, we must come together to fight against these clear injustices.
“The fight that we have ahead of us is not a fight of red or blue,” Belladonna-Carrera said. “It is a fight of fascism, and fascism doesn’t see red or blue.”