Want to make voting easier in Wisconsin? Here are nine ways to do it.

David D. Haynes | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated how often the state has conducted audits of accessibility at polling places for people with disabilities.

This is an updated version of a story first published in December 2018.

The latest partisan skirmish over voting — this time over how quickly to purge the names of people who may have moved — won’t be the last.

President Donald Trump won Wisconsin, perhaps the most important of swing states, by less than 23,000 votes in 2016. The political hands will fight over every last vote.

But imagine for a moment a different world. Imagine if everyone agreed that voting should be as easy as possible.

Here are nine ideas to accomplish that:

Allow automatic registration

Automatic voter registration of all eligible Americans would add 50 million new voters to the rolls and improve accuracy and security of elections, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University argues.

Here’s how it works:

When eligible voters give information to state agencies (such as the Department of Motor Vehicles), they are automatically signed up to vote unless they ask not to be. That information is then transferred electronically to election officials.

Sixteen states (including Illinois and Michigan) and the District of Columbia have adopted this approach. California and Oregon were the first to do so, and the results so far have been encouraging.

A Brennan Center report published in April found that automatic voter registration “markedly increases the number of voters being registered” with increases ranging from 9% to 94%. And, the report found, those increases were noticed in both big and small states as well as states with different partisan makeups.

Be wary of measures that may restrict the vote

For years, some politicians have claimed that voter fraud is a problem that needs to be stamped out through tough voter ID laws.

In reality, there has been a microscopically small amount of fraud.

President Donald Trump could provide no evidence for his dubious claim that “millions” of people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election, and his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity could find no evidence of widespread fraud. Trump disbanded the commission in 2018 before it could issue a final report.

A comprehensive 2007 study by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, found it is more likely that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

The remedy, voter ID laws, have been found to disproportionately affect people of color and the elderly, though their impact on turnout is less clear. In a 2017 analysis of a group of studies, researcher Benjamin Highton found that only “a small number of studies have employed suitable research designs and generally find modest, if any, turnout effects of voter identification laws.”

Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, believes strict voter ID laws like Wisconsin’s tamp down voting.

There is little doubt about what politicians think. Republicans tend to support the laws. Democrats resist them.

RELATED: Effort to stop removal of 234K voter registrations heads to federal court, while attorney general tries to stall purge in state court

RELATED: A judge ordered the state to purge more than 200,000 voters from the rolls. What should I do if I'm one of them?

Another concern is removal of voters from the rolls, the issue at hand in Wisconsin.

An Ozaukee County judge on Dec. 13 ordered the state to remove about 234,000 people from the voting list. The state Elections Commission had sent a letter to those residents in October asking them to update their registrations if they had moved or to acknowledge that they remained at their addresses.

The commission had planned to give the voters more time to comply, but three suburban voters brought a lawsuit demanding that the agency remove the names sooner.

While it's necessary to clean up the lists periodically to ensure people vote in the right precincts, voter advocates say a process that moves too quickly or uses unreliable data can kick people off the rolls who are legitimately registered.

RELATED: As many as 17% of voters are targeted to be removed from the rolls in some Wisconsin cities

A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis found that 55% of the letters sent in October went to municipalities that Democrat Hillary Clinton won in the 2016 presidential contest. A large percentage of voters in some rural communities that supported Trump also received the letters though the raw numbers were small.

To be sure, Wisconsin residents who are purged from the rolls can re-register online with a valid Wisconsin driver's license or state ID card, or they can register at the polls on Election Day, where they need proof of residency, such as a driver's license, property tax bill, utility bill, bank statement or workplace ID.

They are not "prohibited" from voting, as a recent tweet from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's political account stated.

But advocates argue that some people who are removed from the voting rolls won't bother to re-register.

"Any time people have to go through extra steps to vote, and certainly re-registering is a significant additional step, the result is that fewer people end up voting," state Attorney General Josh Kaul told the Journal Sentinel. Kaul said the state would appeal and seek a stay of the judge's order. The Wisconsin League of Women Voters, meantime, has sued in federal court to try to halt the purge of voters.

A Brennan Center analysis found that from 2016 to 2018, counties with a history of voter discrimination were purging people from the rolls at higher rates than other counties.

Ohio, Texas and Georgia all recently have taken steps to remove residents from voter lists.

Make Election Day a national holiday or move it to the weekend

Although turnout during the 2018 midterm elections was higher than normal in Wisconsin, that’s not always the case. In fact, nationwide, the U.S. has some of the lowest voter turnout in the industrialized world. So why not follow the lead of other modern democracies and make Election Day a holiday or move it to a weekend so that people aren’t forced to squeeze voting into their busy workweek schedules?

The National Commission on Election Reform, formed in the wake of the divisive 2000 presidential election, recommended this idea to President George W. Bush who had just defeated Vice President Al Gore after the U.S. Supreme Court halted a recount in Florida, handing the election to Bush. The recommendations of the commission, chaired by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, were heartily endorsed by Bush but then abandoned by Congress.

We’ve been voting on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November since it became the law of the land in 1845. The idea then was to help a nation of farmers get to the polls without interfering with either the Sabbath on Sunday or market day, which was traditionally on Wednesdays.

But would making Election Day a national holiday or moving it to the weekend make a difference in turnout? The evidence isn’t clear. A 2012 Government Accountability Office report predicted little effect on turnout. Nations that allow weekend voting do tend to have higher turnout than the U.S., but it’s not necessarily because of weekend voting.

Weiser isn’t a fan. She’d rather see extended hours for early voting, including weekends.

“The flexibility of early voting provides for a range of different life experiences,” she said. “I think it accomplishes the same goal.” She also favors requiring companies to give workers time off to vote.

Make it easier for people convicted of crimes to vote after serving their sentences

In Wisconsin, voting rights are not restored for felons until their sentence is completed — including prison, extended supervision, probation and parole. Other states restore voting rights earlier in the process. In Michigan, for example, people can vote immediately upon release from prison.

Make sure polling places have enough poll workers and voting machines

If polling places don’t have enough resources, lines build and people give up, said Jonathan Brater, a former counsel for Brennan's Democracy Program. This problem tends to occur more often in poorer communities, often communities of color, Weiser said.

Another concern Weiser raised: making sure that election materials are available in the predominant language spoken in a precinct. Based on research she has seen, “It’s one of the single greatest contributors to the increased likelihood of voting."

Make sure polling places are accessible for people with disabilities

Often, they are not. In 78 polling places audited in the last two years, only four had no accessibility violations. Monitors found 345 problems — over a third of which were considered likely to prevent a voter with a disability from entering a polling place and independently casting a private ballot. There were heavy doors without automatic openers or doorbells, areas where wheelchairs couldn't travel, improper signage and assistive voting equipment that wasn't set up.

Take registration to the people

In the past, the Milwaukee Election Commission has opened voter registration kiosks around town including at Milwaukee Public Library branches and Milwaukee Health Department clinics.

It also included registration information in water bills and provided materials to nonpartisan groups such as Safe & Sound and put materials in brochure racks at businesses and nonprofits. The commission also participated in roundtables with nonpartisan groups working to get out the vote.

The result?

“We believe these largely registration-related outreach efforts increased voter participation but also reduced same-day registration,” said Neil Albrecht, executive director for the Milwaukee Election Commission. He said city voting increased from 208,415 in the 2014 midterms to 216,545 in 2018 and same-day registration fell from 41,389 to 39,758.

Allow 'true' early voting in Wisconsin

Voters would be allowed to insert a ballot directly into a tabulator instead of the ballot being held for processing on Election Day, as it is now. In-person absentee voting is costly, Albrecht says, and "allows voters to submit ballots with errors, thereby losing their votes."

Provide reasonable accommodations for people who have a hard time meeting the requirements

One example: Albrecht says Wisconsin once allowed people to register to vote even if they were unable to meet the proof of residency requirement if witnesses could vouch for them. The current system boosts confidence in the integrity of the vote, he says, but "does not accommodate the very real challenges presented to more transient populations, like people in poverty and students."

David D. Haynes is editor of the Ideas Lab. He reports on innovation in business and government and on government transparency. Ideas Lab reporters write about responses to social problems in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. Email: david.haynes@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DavidDHaynes or Facebook.

How I reported this story

Interviewed:

Wendy Weiser, director, Democracy Program, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Jonathan Brater, former counsel, Democracy Program, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Brater now is director of elections for the state of Michigan.

Sean Morales-Doyle, senior counsel in the Democracy Program, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Neil Albrecht, executive director, City of Milwaukee Election Commission (via email).

Note: In the last few days, I went back to the original sources for this 2018 story to double-check all facts. I also added additional context from the recent Journal Sentinel reporting on voting and purges of voter rolls and interviewed Sean Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center.

Reviewed:

"The Truth About Voter Fraud," 2007, Justin Levitt

"One Person, One Vote: Estimating the Prevalence of Double Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections," 2017.

"Voter Fraud is Not a Persistent Problem," 2016.

"To Assure Pride and Confidence in the Electoral Process" by the National Commission on Election Reform, 2001.