Judge postpones decision on case over Wisconsin college IDs until after election

A federal judge said Wednesday he won’t rule before the election on a lawsuit that challenged a state law requiring college student IDs to have an expiration date in order for them to be used for voter ID.

U.S. District Judge James Peterson canceled a hearing he had scheduled Thursday morning in the case, less than six weeks before the election in the hotly contested battleground state. Peterson said he didn’t want to cause “chaos and confusion” by ruling in the case so close to the election, noting that absentee voting is already underway.

“If the court were to issue an order changing the status quo now, it would leave the (Elections) Commission and municipal clerks with little time to issue new guidance and retrain staff,” Peterson said. “The nearly inevitable appeal would mean weeks of uncertainty as the case was reviewed by the court of appeals and possibly the Supreme Court.”

He also said that any order could “lull student voters into complacency, believing that they now held an ID valid for voting, only to find out on the eve of the election that an appellate court had reached a different conclusion.”