Brian Fraley has the details. It’s good to see this moving ahead.

The courts have thwarted every attempt to overturn Wisconsin’s photo voter identification requirements. So, with this safeguard finally in place, voters here should now be able to register electronically using a valid driver’s license (or free state ID).

Thanks to SB295, which is set for a vote in the State Senate this week, that’s about to be a reality.

Online registration is not online voting. But online registrion will make your voting experience more efficient.

The bill will standardize and secure the voter rolls in Wisconsin by
enrolling the state into the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. ERIC is a non-profit organization run by a collection of 17 member states to share voter data securely.

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Moreover, the Special Registration Deputies will become a thing of the past. Wisconsin is the only state that allows SRDs to verify proof of residency during the voter registration process. That’s a recipe for fraud and an invitation for outside groups to merely use the voter registration process to build membership lists for their own organizations. They will be replaced by Electronic Registration Officials. These EROs will be able to register electors for in-person absentee voting, on election day at polling stations, and in nursing homes. But, the hodgepodge of paper voter registration forms flooding the system, having only been ‘validated’ by activist SRDs, will be history.

Liberal groups are opposing this legislation because of the elimination of SRDs precisely because they like to use the process as Fraley describes. For many of them, voter registration drives are less about registering people to vote and more about collecting contact information for their own purposes.