State election officials decided Wednesday to allow technical college students to use their school IDs at the polls, saying they made a mistake two months ago by ruling that such IDs didn’t qualify as photo identification.

The Government Accountability Board’s surprise move, coupled with another decision Wednesday to permit colleges to affix two-year stickers to ID cards, immediately touched off a firestorm. Republican lawmakers say the board has overstepped its bounds and weakened the state’s new voter ID law.

Sen. Leah Vukmir, R-Wauwatosa, co-chairwoman of the Legislature’s rules committee, quickly scheduled a hearing for Tuesday to order the board to put its policies into rule format, which the panel could then suspend.

“We gave them the benefit of the doubt…but it’s clear that they had their intentions set and they chose to ignore the very clear direction the committee gave them,” Vukmir said.

GAB spokesman Reid Magney said board members felt they were interpreting the law as written.

“The board understood this was a possible consequence of its actions,” Magney said.

Wisconsin’s new voter identification law requires voters to show photo IDs at the polls beginning with February’s elections. Driver’s licenses, state identification cards and college and university IDs all qualify under the law.

The Government Accountability Board, a panel of retired judges that oversees state elections, is responsible for implementing the measure. The board ruled in September that tech college student IDs wouldn’t count. Almost 400,000 students, or 10 percent of the state’s voting-age population, are enrolled at a state technical college.

Board members based their decision on a staff analysis that concluded the law didn’t specifically authorize technical college IDs as valid voter photo identification. The analysis noted Assembly Republicans defeated a Democratic amendment that would have included tech college IDs, citing that vote as further evidence the Legislature didn’t want tech college IDs to qualify.

But technical college leaders and students deluged the board with complaints. The board agreed to reconsider the ruling at Wednesday’s meeting.

College officials and students spent hours at the meeting arguing their schools are accredited just like four-year universities and that board members were treating them like second-class citizens.

Milwaukee Area Technical College student Adam Strozier said disallowing technical students to use their IDs for voting would “perpetuate a bias against our colleges which (has) existed for too long in this state.” Strozier is the lieutenant governor of the student government organization for all 16 state technical college campuses.

Board Director Kevin Kennedy asked the board to adopt a motion reaffirming their original ruling, but the board did an about face. At the close of testimony, board member Timothy Vocke immediately remarked, “I think we were wrong last month.”

Later Wednesday, the board refused to revisit its policy on student ID stickers.

The voter ID law allows students to use their school IDs at the polls only if the cards expire within two years, but most Wisconsin schools issue four- or five-year IDs. The two-year caveat in the law would force them to pay for new cards.

The accountability board ruled in September that schools could satisfy the requirement by attaching two-year stickers to their IDs similar to annual vehicle registration stickers on license plates. Republicans on the rules committee objected, saying the stickers could open the door to fraud.

Kennedy told the committee he would ask the board to rescind the policy. But the board refused to go along with him Wednesday, saying the sticker approach is still the most affordable option for small schools.

Vukmir said the board ignored “a strong message” from the committee to drop the sticker plan. She said the committee will order the board to put that policy in the form of a rule, giving the committee the power to suspend part or all of the language.

She said the Legislature’s attorneys are still researching whether technical schools qualify as universities under the law, but its authors clearly didn’t intend the measure to apply to technical schools.

“The vast majority of people who voted for this bill never thought they were including tech colleges,” she said.

The bill’s chief sponsors, Rep. Jeff Stone, R-Greendale, and Sen. Joe Leibham, R-Sheboygan, didn’t immediately return messages.

Wisconsin Republicans have been pushing for voter ID requirements for the better part of a decade, saying the mandate would reduce election fraud.

Democrats have countered no such fraud exists in Wisconsin and Republicans are really out to disenfranchise Democratic constituencies that lack identification, such as the poor and students. Republicans finally passed the law in June after taking complete control of the Legislature and the governor’s office in last year’s elections.

The League of Women Voters filed a lawsuit last month alleging the law violates the Wisconsin Constitution. The lawsuit claims the law improperly bars a new class of people – namely, those without IDs – from voting.