Laws that limited in-person absentee voting to one location, limited early voting hours and eliminated weekend voting are unconstitutional, Peterson ruled.
The 2013 law limiting hours for in-person absentee voting “intentionally discriminates on the basis of race,” Peterson wrote in a 119-page decision.
“I reach this conclusion because I am persuaded that this law was specifically targeted to curtail voting in Milwaukee without any other legitimate purpose. The legislature’s immediate goal was to achieve a partisan objective, but the means of achieving that objective was to suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African Americans,” Peterson wrote.
Peterson — who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama in 2014 — also overturned laws that increased the residency requirement for voters from 10 days to 28 days, prohibited distributing absentee ballots by fax or email and required “dorm lists” used as proof of residence to include citizenship information.
Notice that he doesn’t even bother to cite law in his explanation. Instead, he considers his opinion as to the intentions of the duly-elected legislators who voted for this law as justification enough. In other words, he thinks that the opinion of one man – him – should supersede the entire process of elections and law-making. We are increasingly becoming a country where the will of the people no longer matters. All that matters are the opinions of jackasses in robes with jobs for life.
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