On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of voters in Wisconsin will be forced to choose between exercising their constitutional right to vote and safeguarding their own lives, not to mention the lives of their loved ones, their neighbors and poll workers across the state.
That’s the predicament in which Republican state lawmakers have placed Wisconsinites — who have been under a stay-at-home order since March 25 — by refusing to agree to postpone the state’s April 7 presidential primary or to give all voters the option to cast a ballot by mail. Republicans control both chambers of Wisconsin’s Legislature.
The stay-at-home order, issued by Gov. Tony Evers, bars people from leaving their homes except for food or medical needs, or to care for a family member or other vulnerable person. When they do go out, they must stay six feet away from other people — a near-impossible task at the polls. “There is no way for us to abide by those guidelines and at the same time administer an in-person election,” said the mayor of Green Bay, Eric Genrich.
As of Friday, 1,730 Wisconsinites had tested positive for Covid-19, and 37 had died.
Governor Evers, a Democrat, initially supported holding the election as scheduled. In late March, after the state’s coronaviruses cases soared above 700, he called for absentee ballots to be mailed to all state residents. On Friday afternoon, he made a last-ditch effort, calling the Legislature to meet in a special session on Saturday to consider legislation that would switch the state to all-mail voting, with a May 26 deadline for returning ballots.
Yet Republican lawmakers appear to be forging ahead with Tuesday’s vote, which includes many state and local races — and, crucially, a fight for a seat on the State Supreme Court, which already has a Republican majority.
It’s no surprise that front-line election workers, who come face to face with hundreds if not thousands of voters, are balking. Roughly 7,000 poll workers have said they won’t show up for fear of being infected with the coronavirus. Who could blame them? Many are older and at increased risk from an infection.
As a result of the walkout, however, more than 100 precincts will have no poll workers. In Milwaukee, which usually operates 180 polling sites, fewer than 12 may be open on Tuesday. Because Wisconsin law requires at least three election workers to be stationed at each polling site, Governor Evers said he would deploy National Guard troops to do the job if necessary.
Meanwhile, poll workers who plan to be present on Tuesday are taking whatever protective measures they can. Some are fashioning sneeze guards by propping sheets of plexiglass between card tables. Others are considering wrapping voting booths in plastic.
This is insane, and utterly unnecessary. Fifteen states, including four with primaries scheduled for this coming week, have already postponed their elections; several have canceled all in-person voting and are relying solely on mail-in ballots. On Thursday the Democratic National Committee pushed back its national convention, which is scheduled to be held in Milwaukee, from July to August.
Republicans insist that widespread mail voting would be an “invitation for voter fraud,” even though evidence suggests fraud is actually lower in states with all-mail balloting. They also argue it would be logistically impossible to print and mail so many ballots before Tuesday. If so, then why not just push back the election, as Mr. Evers has proposed? The answer can only be that Republican legislators don’t want people to vote.
These are the same Republicans, you might recall, who in 2011 gerrymandered Wisconsin’s legislative district maps so egregiously that they were able to win more than 60 percent of the seats while losing the statewide popular vote to Democrats.
These are the same Republicans who, with that ill-gotten majority, passed a strict voter-ID law that denied ballot access to black and Latino Wisconsinites at far higher rates than whites. The law reduced turnout in 2016 by 200,000 votes from 2012, in a key battleground state that Donald Trump won by fewer than 23,000.
And these are the same Republicans who, knowing that Wisconsin could be a decisive state in the 2020 election, are hoping to lock in a state judge’s recent purge of more than 230,000 voters, disproportionately from Democratic-voting areas. The judge’s ruling, which targeted voters believed to have moved, has been appealed to the State Supreme Court.
On Thursday, a federal judge declined to delay the primary, but he extended the deadline for returning absentee ballots and loosened the requirement that ballots be signed by a witness. These fixes don’t come close to creating the conditions for a fair election, but they are both clearly necessary given the more than one million absentee ballots that have been requested — a number that is many times higher than average and is already overwhelming understaffed elections offices. Republican lawmakers immediately appealed the ruling.
In their zeal to ram through this vote, Republicans are subjecting Wisconsinites to the worst of both worlds: a turnout that will be sharply reduced because so many voters will continue to do the right thing and abide by the stay-at-home order, and yet one that will still be large enough to overwhelm the few precincts that will be open, and expose untold numbers of people to potential infection.
Turnout is likely to be especially lower in Democratic-leaning cities like Milwaukee, which holds an overwhelming majority of the state’s minority voters and which has been hit hardest by the pandemic.
Wisconsin Republicans aren’t outliers in their attempts to make voting harder. Republicans across the country have known for years that they win when fewer people vote.
But what they used to say quietly has now become a central element of the party’s platform. Last year, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, called a proposal to make Election Day a holiday a “power grab” by Democrats — essentially admitting that if voting were easier, Republicans would suffer at the polls.
The point was made explicit this week by Georgia’s House speaker, David Ralston, who opposed a push for mail-in ballots to be sent to every registered voter on the ground that it would encourage more people to vote. “This will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia,” Mr. Ralston said in a local news interview. “This will certainly drive up turnout.”
And there was President Trump himself, who functions as the Republican id, venting on “Fox & Friends” about voter-friendly provisions that House Democrats had included in a draft of the coronavirus stimulus package. “The things they had in there were crazy,” Mr. Trump said. “They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
The only good that could come of this travesty would be the demonstration of what happens when huge numbers of voters can’t cast a ballot, either in person or by mail. If you are concerned about voter turnout becoming a nationwide problem in November’s general election — and you should be — pay attention to what happens in Wisconsin’s benighted primary. Republicans hope it will be a harbinger of our future. All Americans who care about democracy need to ensure that it isn’t.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
