Who Lacks a Photo ID in Wisconsin?

Wisconsin has required residents to present a photo ID in order to vote in every November election beginning with 2016[1]. On April 1, voters will have the opportunity to add this requirement as an amendment to the state constitution. It will probably pass. The latest Marquette Law School Poll found 77% support for the ID requirement generally and 73% support for the constitutional amendment.

Supporters of the requirement argue that it’s a good way to prevent voter fraud. Opponents fear that it creates an onerous requirement for eligible citizens without IDs. During federal litigation following the bill’s passage an expert witness estimated that 300,000 then-registered voters lacked an appropriate identification card. Another witness ran a survey which found that 63,000 Milwaukee County residents likely lacked a state ID card.

To my surprise, I could find no more recent analysis of the number of Wisconsin adults lacking a photo ID card. This article is my attempt to answer two questions. How common is it for a Wisconsinite to lack a photo ID? Are there patterns in who lacks them?

Wisconsin Voter Turnout

First, here are some basic facts about voter participation in Wisconsin. Turnout has consistently been very high in this state—typically among the highest in the country.

Opponents feared that the introduction of the photo ID requirement would reduce turnout. This does not appear to have happened, at least in a long-term way.

In 2008, 69.8% of adults voted. This fell ever-so-slightly to 69.6% in 2012. Then, turnout dropped much more noticeably in 2016, down to 66.5% of adults. Voters became much more engaged after Trump’s first election. Turnout jumped to 71.8% of adults in 2020.

Despite a national decline in voter turnout in 2024, it grew in Wisconsin to 72.8% of adults. Turnout was probably highest in Wisconsin out of all 50 states, whether measured as a share of all adults or voting-eligible adults.

Midterm voter turnout grew even faster than presidential turnout after the introduction of the photo ID requirement. Before the requirement, in 2010, 49.9% of adults voted. In 2014, 54.4% participated, growing to 58.8% in 2018. Turnout dipped to 57.7% in 2022.

graph showing wisconsin's adult population and voter turnout from 2000 through 2024

Concerns about the impact of the photo ID law were particularly high in Milwaukee. Here, turnout dropped from 2012 to 2016 in presidential elections but grew in midterm elections from 2014 to 2018.

These overall turnout trends do not preclude the possibility that turnout would’ve been even higher in 2024 without a photo ID law. But they do imply a fairly low ceiling on the size of such an affect. The share of adults participating in Wisconsin’s democracy has probably never been higher than in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when they were also among the highest rates recorded by any US state since at least 1980.[2]

Current Photo ID Holders by Age

The circa 2011 estimates of people without a photo ID were mostly based on comparing the names in the registered voter database with the names in the DMV driver license database. That approach won’t work anymore, even if one had access to the DMV database (I don’t). Today, if you’re registered to vote in Wisconsin, you almost certainly also hold a photo ID.[3]

Instead, I obtained an aggregated dataset of ID holders by age from the Wisconsin DMV. It includes all kinds of IDs issued by the DMV (not just driver licenses). It does not include other permissible photo IDs, like tribal and student IDs.

My data shows the number of DMV photo ID holders in early 2025. In the chart below, I compare those totals for every year of age, 14 through 84, with our best estimate of the number of Wisconsin residents who were that age in January 2025.[4]

The number of ID holders is shown in red and the population estimate is shown in blue.

About 4% of 14 year-olds hold state ID cards, but the number increases rapidly with each subsequent teenage year. The number of 18 year-old ID card holders is 90% of the estimated 18 year-old population, and this grows to 98% among 24 year-olds. Recall, of course, that many of these young people are college students, and many student ID cards can be used to vote.

graph showing the number of IDs and the population for individual ages in Wisconsin

After age 24, something interesting happens in the data. Among those ages 25-42, the number of ID card holders noticeably exceeds the total population. The difference peaks at age 33, among whom there are 75,300 residents and 81,700 ID holders.

This excess in ID card holders is evidently the result of population mobility among young adults. The likelihood of moving out of Wisconsin peaks in the late-teens-to-early 30s. When such a person moves from Wisconsin to, say, Minneapolis, their existing ID card does not automatically or immediately expire.

Initial Wisconsin driver licenses last 2 years and renewed licenses expire 8 years after the recipient’s next birthday. So someone who renewed at age 20, then moved out-of-state after college graduation, would potentially be counted as a current Wisconsin photo ID holder until age 28, at least so long as they avoided getting a driver license in their new state.

Wisconsin participates in something called the “State to State (S2S) Verification Service,” along with 41 other states and the District of Columbia. This program alerts state DMVs when a person holding a license in one state receives a license in another (they match on SSNs). The goal is to prevent people from holding licenses in multiple states at once. Notably, Illinois is not a member of S2S (probably related to its still ongoing struggle to become real ID compliant). So Wisconsinites who move to Illinois will likely remain on the list of Wisconsin ID holders for longer than those moving into another neighboring state.

graph showing the percentage of each age group who moved out of Wisconsin in the past year

From the mid-40s onward, the number of DMV ID holders and the actual population converge. The degree of correlation is striking.

It’s not just that the general trends are similar. Even abrupt changes are matched in the two data sources. For example, the estimated population falls slowly between ages 75 and 77, sharply from 77 to 79, and slowly again from 79 to 80. This exact pattern is the same in both the population estimates and the ID counts.

AgePopulation Est.ID Holders #
7553,60053,700
7650,10050,700
7749,60049,800
7842,30042,500
7933,30033,800
8032,10032,300

Notice that the number of ID holders still slightly exceeds the population for each age. This reflects, I believe, an unavoidable delay in processing death certificates plus the continued effect of IDs expiring after their holder has left the state.

How Many Adults Lack an ID?

What we’d really like to know is the number of valid DMV ID cards held by a current resident of Wisconsin. . Nobody knows this statistic, but we can estimate its lower bound.

Each year, the Census Bureau estimates the number of people who moved out of Wisconsin in the previous year.[5] It bounces around a bit from one year to another, but typically about 10,000 18 or 19 year-olds and 83,000 adults age 20 or older leave the state.

Standard licenses last for 8 years after your next birthday and initial (or “probationary”) licenses last for two. Knowing this, we can estimate how many recent movers would hold an unexpired Wisconsin ID, if that ID remained valid until its scheduled expiration date.

For the purposes of this calculation I assume that every 18 or 19 year-old mover held a probationary license and every other adult held a full driver license (an overestimate, no doubt). I further assume that people leaving Wisconsin do so randomly with regard to their ID card’s expiration date. Someone leaving the state is equally likely to hold an ID card that they renewed 1 year ago as they are to hold a card expiring in 1 year.

Consequently, I estimate that three quarters of the 76,000 people (age 20 and older) who left the state 2 years ago still hold a DMV ID card that has not yet reached its printed expiration date.

Adding up each year’s fraction of the movers still holding an “unexpired” ID, I get an estimate of 304,000 “unexpired” DMV ID cards actually belonging to someone who no longer lives in Wisconsin.

Subtracting this number from the count of adult DMV IDs, we get 4.43 million ID card holders, or 94% of the state’s adult population of 4.72 million. By this measure, 290,000 adults (6%) would lack a DMV-issued ID card.

Of course, this is the outer boundary of estimates for the non-ID-having population. The actual number must certainly be lower—possibly much lower—thanks to Wisconsin’s participation in the S2S system.

When our hypothetical twenty-something moves to Minnesota after college, their Wisconsin ID will only last until they receive a Minnesota ID to replace it. How long they wait before applying for this ID is unknown. I can find no statistics from the S2S system reporting the number of matches they process.

And we have the issue of Illinois. The Census Bureau estimates that 14,000 people (of any age) made the move from Wisconsin to Illinois in 2023. Thanks to Illinois’ lack of participation in the S2S system, these movers are probably more likely to remain on the books in Wisconsin.

All of this is to say, the plausible share of adult Wisconsin residents without a DMV-issued ID lies somewhere less than 100% and greater than 94%.

What Predicts Fewer ID Holders?

The population without a DMV ID card is evidently small, but it could be concentrated among particular groups of people. To measure this, I designed a linear regression model predicting the ratio of ID holders per 100 adults in each census tract. The dependent variable is adult ID holders as a percentage of the adult population and the independent variables are listed with their coefficients in the table.

table showing regression results

Naturally, the largest predictor of more IDs is movers out of Wisconsin. For every 1 percentage point increase in the share of the population who left Wisconsin in the previous year, the number of IDs per 100 grows by 1.6.

The opposite is also true. If more people in the tract are recent arrivals to Wisconsin, the tract has fewer ID cards. As expected, ID cards are also less common in places with more college students and 18-19 year-olds. (Some of these will have student IDs that allow them vote.)

More concerning is the effect of poverty. The number of IDs per adults declines by 0.24 with every 1 point increase in the share of adults living below the poverty line.

A 1-year increase in the median age has a similarly-sized positive effect in increasing the number of ID holders.

All else being equal, a 1 percentage point increase in the Black and Asian populations is associated with 0.27 and 0.18 point increases, respectively, in the share with a photo ID.

Conclusion

The great majority of Wisconsin adults hold a photo ID card from the DMV. The total number of ID holders exceeds the adult population because ID cards often expire years after the holder moved out of the state. After estimating the number of unexpired IDs attributable to those who’ve left the state, I estimate that fewer than 6% of adult Wisconsin residents may lack a DMV photo ID card.

A regression analysis suggests that the adults least likely to hold an ID card are those in their late teens, college students, and new arrivals to the state. College students commonly receive photo IDs which can be used to vote and new arrivals likely just haven’t gotten around to updating their DMV registration.

This leaves young adults who aren’t enrolled in college and adults living in poverty as the two groups most likely to be harmed by the photo ID requirement for voters.

Wisconsin’s voter turnout rates have continued to climb since implementing a photo ID requirement for voters prior to the 2016 election. In 2024, Wisconsin actually had the highest voter turnout rate in the nation. This likely reflects government efforts to make voter ID cards freely available with minimal paperwork, and successful efforts to help more people apply for those cards. Nonetheless, it remains the case that young and poor people are less likely to have a photo ID, though this is not true of racial minorities according to the regression analysis.


[1] The law was originally passed in 2011, but it underwent extensive state and federal litigation that prevented its use in the 2012 and 2014 general elections. See this timeline for more details.

[2] See voter turnout rates as a share of the voting age population published by Michael McDonald.

[3] One must present proof of residence in order to register to vote, which could be a current photo ID but could also take the form of, e.g., a utility bill. A photo ID is only required in order to request a ballot. Wisconsin’s voter roll maintenance stipulates that, following each general election, postcards are mailed to every registrant who hasn’t voted in the past four years. If the registrant fails to return the postcard, they are struck from the voter rolls. So, technically, it would be possible for someone without a photo ID to register to vote, never actually cast a ballot, but remain on the voter rolls by faithfully returning the maintenance postcard every two years.

[4] I leave the 85+ population off the graph because that population estimate is given as a total and not by single year of age. The relationship of IDs to population is the same for this age bracket as for other older adults. After adjusting the 2023 population estimates for age specific mortality rates, I estimate that 120,800 adults age 85 and older lived in Wisconsin in January 2025. At that time, there were 121,500 DMV IDs issues to people in the age bracket.

[5] These numbers are collected by the American Community Survey (ACS). The 2024 estimate is unavailable, so I substituted the average of 2022 and 2023. No 1-year estimates were published for 2020 (due to pandemic disruptions to data collection), so I substituted the average of 2019 and 2021.

Continue ReadingWho Lacks a Photo ID in Wisconsin?

Examining the “System” in Criminal Justice Reform, Part I: Cleveland and the Milwaukee County Community Justice Council

Roscoe Pound
Roscoe Pound

“Welcome to Cleveland” is the famous sign that airline passengers approaching Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport from the north have spotted since 1978, when Milwaukee’s Bayview resident Mark Gubin painted the greeting on the roof of his Delaware Avenue studio apartment.

To the weary descending traveler, the two post-industrial cities on the shore of a Great Lake share enough superficial similarity to induce panic in the first-time visitor, but Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, also share a more profound legacy. They both exemplify a historical theme in American criminal jurisprudence: a recurring (if episodic) commitment to reforming and improving imperfect systems of social control in a democratic republic.

I believe that my laying a historical foundation can help me present reforms attempted in Milwaukee in the past 20 years. I also intend, in a subsequent post, to link those efforts to reform efforts around the country.

The groundbreaking 1922 Cleveland Crime Survey and the creation of the Milwaukee County Community Justice Council in 2007 are separated by 85 years but motivated by similar social forces and dynamics challenging the fair administration of justice. The persistence of these challenges and of the efforts to do better reflect the hope that citizens place in the genuine and perceived power of the state to regulate a complex society. Yet it also raises a question about the limitations of the law as the primary vehicle of that regulation.

Over 100 years ago, Felix Frankfurter, Harvard law professor and future U.S. Supreme Court justice, wrote the preface for a report titled Criminal Justice in Cleveland. This was a detailed 700-page examination of Cleveland’s justice process, commissioned by the non-government Cleveland Foundation, which had invited leading national legal experts and scholars to conduct an independent examination of the inner workings of the scandal-ridden Cleveland justice system. The incident itself seems strangely contemporary, as it involved reckless intoxicated driving, a fatal shooting, and compromised witnesses. What made it exceptional was that a perpetrator was the judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court, responsible for adjudicating criminal matters.

Frankfurter wrote:

For some time previous to this survey Cleveland had been restive under a growing feeling of insecurity of life and property. The fifth largest city in the country entertained a wide-spread conviction of its failure in the most primitive function of government. In the spring of 1920 this feeling was brought to a head. An atrocious and sordid crime, implicating the chief judge of the city’s municipal courts, stirred to action dormant civic pride. With rare self-restraint and self-knowledge the leaders of the community realized that the city had the feeling, but not the understanding, for action. They had the insight to realize that this sensational case was but symptomatic of deeper causes. In a word, a problem in social sanitation and social engineering was presented. Therefore, in the winter of 1920, a number of civic organizations, headed by the Cleveland Bar Association, requested the Cleveland Foundation to undertake a survey of the administration of criminal justice in Cleveland.

The yearlong examination resulted in a report: Criminal Justice in Cleveland. Samuel Walker, in Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice, described the entity that prepared the report as “the single most important crime commission” in American history. “It established the model of examining a complete criminal-justice system and was copied by numerous state and federal crime commissions,” Walker explained. “The co-directors of the Cleveland survey were two of the most significant figures in the history of American law: Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter.”

In fact, the now-reflexive habit of speaking of the criminal justice process as a system arguably dates from this 1922 report. As Walker has noted, the report also had the salient effect of unmasking for the first time the reality and pervasiveness of plea bargaining in the justice system.

The Cleveland study broke down and examined the critical decision points of the city’s justice apparatus progressively: closely examining police, prosecutors, judges, defense bar, corrections, juvenile justice, forensic sciences, and even the role of the press. It then made constructive recommendations on how to improve the system.

Roscoe Pound’s ending summation in the report is titled “Criminal Justice in The American City” and is fascinating reading that would be instructive for every participant in criminal law administration today. What stands out in the 1922 examination is how many of the dynamics present at that time are with us today. Hear Pound:

We may say that the three chief factors in the administration of justice are—(1) the men by whom it is administered; (2) the machinery of legal and political institutions by means of which they administer justice; and (3) the environment in which they do so. One who surveys the workings of a legal system with these three things in mind will not go far wrong.

[¶] Yet his picture will not be complete nor wholly accurate. He must take account also of certain practical limitations and practical difficulties inherent in the legal ordering of human relations, at least by any legal institutions thus far devised. The purposes of law, as we know them, and the very nature of legal institutions as we have received and fashioned them, involve certain obstacles to our doing everything which we should like to do by means thereof, and even to our doing well many things which we have been trying to do thereby for generations. These practical limitations on effective legal action explain much that, on a superficial view, is ascribed to bad men or bad legal machinery.

[¶] Hence a fourth factor must be added, namely, (4) the bounds within which the law may function effectively as a practical system.

The report exposed an overburdened criminal docket, chaotic court environment, uninterested and disengaged prosecutors, inadequately trained police, an unprofessional defense bar, and a lack of any objective rigor in the forensic sciences. The report’s approach enhanced awareness of the criminal justice process as an ecosystem, where each component of the system influenced, and in turn was influenced by, the system’s other parts.

The problems in Cleveland were not unique. The system troubles examined in Cleveland were also present in the Milwaukee Municipal Court system of the era: consider a 1922 grand jury investigation involving corrupt practices in the district attorney’s office and the court systems. The proliferation of crime commissions following the Cleveland survey demonstrate that many other cities shared similar attributes.

Fast forward, if you will, to 2007. The convening and creation of the Milwaukee County Community Justice Council that year was similarly driven by experienced community and system participants who shared, in Frankfurter’s words, “the feeling, but not the understanding, for action.”

To be more precise, there was a generalized understanding that Milwaukee County’s criminal justice system needed to change in four important ways:

  1. How we treated the drug-addicted
  2. How we treated the mentally ill
  3. How we treated traumatized people
  4. How we treated people in our detention facilities

Unifying those four areas of concern was the strong perception that Black Milwaukeeans were disproportionately present in the system as defendants and victims.

Three significant events of the time helped form that “feeling.” First was the savage off-duty police beating of Frank Jude in 2004; second, a court’s ruling that the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office was noncompliant with a consent decree requiring improved jail conditions (the Christensen decree); and, finally, the pending release of a national study showing that Wisconsin had the second highest incarceration rate for Blacks in the nation.

There was less understanding of how to accomplish change. While Milwaukee justice leaders certainly would have benefited from a review of Cleveland’s historical template, the path to reform is perhaps better described as a confluence of several organic relationships with events that occurred in 2006, merging in 2007 to support the creation of what is now known as the Milwaukee Community Justice Council (CJC).

For one thing, 2006 was a transitional year, with Milwaukee County’s first open-seat election for district attorney since 1968. During that year as a candidate, I spent significant time talking to practitioners such as Tom Reed, the regional manager of the State Public Defender’s Office; criminal defense attorney Craig Mastantuono; and community members including Kit McNally, Reverand Joe Ellwanger, and members of the Community Brainstorming Conference such as Dr. Pam Malone.

So much was flowing together. My colleague Jeff Altenburg was working in the D.A.’s office as a community prosecutor, and my soon-to-be Chief Deputy Kent Lovern was on the boards of both the National Alliance on Mental Illness and Sojourner Family Peace Center (as it is now known). E. Michael McCann, in his last year as district attorney, invited me to join him in a discussion with the Vera Institute of Justice about conducting the first internal review of data from a D.A.’s office focused on racial disparity. In addition, in 2006 the Milwaukee County Circuit Court found that the Sheriff’s Office was not in compliance with the Christensen consent decree requiring improvement in jail conditions for pretrial detainees.

All these streams—and any number of others—came together after the election, in 2007, when we gathered system leaders ostensibly to address the problems in the jail through regular convening. The Milwaukee County Community Justice Council (here’s an early profile in 2011) could have been a limited-term, narrowly focused exercise to reduce jail overcrowding and improve jail conditions. In fact, in part because of the relationships formed during those crucial months, the CJC instead was converted into a vehicle for data-informed, practical, best-practice reform even beyond taking on the need for improved conditions in the jail.

The succeeding years saw the CJC deliberately invite numerous external academic and public policy groups to help examine and implement better policy in the Milwaukee County judicial system. The list is impressive and continues to this day. Some examples: The Wisconsin Policy Forum helped us envision a screening process for everyone arrested and brought to jail; a visit by the chief judge of the Buffalo (New York) drug treatment and veterans’ court resulted in the launching of a Milwaukee program shortly afterwards. The National Institute of Corrections accepted us in a competitive bid to implement an evidence-based decision-making (EBDM) framework to inform us of our intake procedure to deflect people with drug, alcohol and mental health issues. The Arnold Foundation helped develop a risk-assessment tool, and the Homicide Review Commission was brought into the CJC. The District Attorney’s Office completed a first in the nation study in a D.A.’s office of race and charging, with the Vera Institute, and was enrolled in the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge. (The list goes on, to include such developments as convening the Emergency Operation Center for COVID, which transformed into the current Violence Reduction Public Health and Safety Team, and the opening of Sojourner Family Peace and the Alma Center, etc.)

The linkage among the four problem areas I described above seems obvious today. We have come a long way as a community and nation to understand that trauma, mental health, addiction, and poverty are all closely correlated. We still have a long way to go in implementing effective solutions outside the criminal justice system. In subsequent posts, I hope to expand in more detail upon the reforms initiated by the CJC and examine what worked, what didn’t work and what the future may hold.

Any report prefaced by Felix Frankfurter and concluded by a summary from Roscoe Pound should, I believe, at least occasionally be dusted off and revisited. My colleagues have often heard me say that stored energy—the energy that comes from analysis, deliberation, and review—is important, but kinetic energy, even if imperfectly released, creates change. The 1922 Cleveland report is the kind of stored energy that the academy expertly creates so that practitioners can release the energy of reform in a focused, purposeful, examined manner. The Community Justice Council—at its best—is the mechanism for kinetic change.

Continue ReadingExamining the “System” in Criminal Justice Reform, Part I: Cleveland and the Milwaukee County Community Justice Council

With Many Voters Still Undecided, Videos of Lubar Center “Get to Know” Programs of Supreme Court Candidates Can Help

Seal of the Supreme Court of WisconsinA problem, before a solution: The problem is that a large number of registered voters in Wisconsin do not know enough about or do not have an opinion of the two candidates running in the April 1 election for a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. Results of the Marquette Law School Poll released on March 5 found that 38 percent of voters do not have an opinion about Brad Schimel, former Wisconsin attorney general and now a Waukesha County circuit judge, and 58 percent do not have an opinion about Susan Crawford, a Dane County circuit judge. The two are squaring off in what some commentators have called the most important election underway currently in the United States.

One of the current justices, Ann Walsh Bradley, is retiring after 30 years of serving on the court. That means that the outcome of the formally nonpartisan race between Crawford, who is strongly backed by Democrats, and Schimel, who is strongly backed by Republicans, is regarded as likely to have decisive impact on several major upcoming cases before the court. Yet, with election day approaching quickly, the candidates have not established their identity with many voters.

The solution is two “Get to Know” programs at Marquette Law School, hosted by Derek Mosley, director of the Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, in which Crawford and Schimel talked about who they are and what they stand for. The public conversations, on February 18 with Schimel and Feb. 28 with Crawford, provide good looks at the candidates in a format that is welcoming. And each is available online (see links at the end of this post).

Both candidates talked about their personal stories. Schimel was born in West Allis, grew up mostly in Waukesha County, and was a long-time prosecutor in Waukesha County, including a run as district attorney. Then he was elected Wisconsin attorney general, serving 2015–2019. Crawford grew up in Chippewa Falls. She was hired by Jim Doyle, then the attorney general of Wisconsin, to work in the state justice department and subsequently worked as a lawyer for the state Department of Corrections and the Department of Natural Resources before becoming chief legal counsel to Doyle while he was governor. She also was in private practice as a civil litigator before becoming a judge in 2018.

Mosley asked Schimel why he was running for the Supreme Court. “I watched what happened in 2023,” he said, when Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated former Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly in the most expensive judicial race in American history. That swung the balance of the court to the side widely considered more liberal and led to rulings such as reopening work on legislative district boundaries in Wisconsin. Schimel said that Protasiewicz gave her opinion of some legal issues during the campaign. He said that justices need to have an open mind on issues “until the last word is said.” He described himself as “a judicial conservative” and said that, for a justice, “the foundation of what you do is you don’t make law.”

In her conversation with Mosley, Crawford said that “My judicial philosophy is pragmatism” and that, as a judge, her goal is to apply the law fairly and impartially. “I don’t look at judicial issues as abstract principles,” she said. She said her broad experience in many areas of the law makes her “exceptionally well qualified” to serve on the Supreme Court. “I’m running to be a fair and impartial justice on the Supreme Court,” she said.

At a time when large numbers of registered voters say they don’t know enough about either of the candidates, the “Get to Know” label for a series of Lubar Center programs is particularly apt. The one-hour video of the Feb. 18 conversation with Judge Schimel may be viewed by clicking here. The one-hour video of the Feb. 28 conversation with Judge Crawford may be viewed by clicking here.

Continue ReadingWith Many Voters Still Undecided, Videos of Lubar Center “Get to Know” Programs of Supreme Court Candidates Can Help