The Wisconsin primary of 2020

The Wisconsin primary election of April 7th 2020 is remarkable not because of who won – we will not know that till next week – but because it is one of the few elections in the US to proceed during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Worse: It shows how Republicans, the party of White minority rule, will use the pandemic to steal elections, mainly by undermining voting by mail (absentee ballots).

Wisconsin is a Rust Belt state which Trump won by just 23,000 votes in 2016. Compared to 2012, some 200,000 fewer people voted, thanks in part to a strict voter ID law aimed at Blacks and Latinos.

Pandemic peak: April and May 2020 are expected to be the two worst months of the pandemic in the US, at least in its first wave. Most states went into lockdown, keeping people at home as much as possible. And, if they had an election due in April or May, they put it off till June when, hopefully, the worst will be over.

Wisconsin went on lockdown on March 25th. But it did not delay its election due on April 7th!

The governor, Democrat Tony Evers,  tried to get the election delayed, but the Republicans, who control the legislature thanks to gerrymandering, blocked him.

It went all the way to the US Supreme Court, where the 5-4 Republican majority ruled in favour of Republicans lawmakers in Wisconsin. The Court said it was too late to delay the election – overlooking the fact that the state was under a pandemic lockdown and that, due to high demand, at least 12,000 mail-in ballots were not sent out in time.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in behalf of the 4 dissenters:

“If a voter already in line by the poll’s closing time can still vote, why should Wisconsin’s absentee voters, already in line to receive ballots, be denied the franchise?”

The Republicans on the Court were unmoved. So the primary went forward,

Many polling places were closed because volunteer election workers were too afraid to show up during a pandemic.

And so yesterday you saw long lines of people – who should have been at home! – standing in line for hours to vote, helping to spread the pandemic. Many wore face masks and stood at least two metres apart, some did not.

But how do Republicans benefit? Because the pandemic, so far, is hitting Democratic parts of the state harder. Milwaukee, for example, is a heavily Democratic city of 600,000. Of its 180 polling places only five were open.

In particular, Wisconsin Republicans want Daniel Kelly elected to the state’s supreme court. He backs a plan, held up in the courts, to purge 240,000 voters from mostly Democratic parts of the state.

President Trump: In March, when Democrats wanted money in the $2.2 trillion pandemic stimulus bill to make large-scale mail-in voting possible during the pandemic, Trump said:

“The things they had in there were crazy, they had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to, you would never have another Republican elected in this country again.”

– Abagond, 2020.

See also:

• The coronavirus
• The 2020 election for US president
• voter suppression
  • gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965
  • gerrymandering
  • voter ID
  • voter purges
• Republicans are going over a cliff
• The future of race in the US

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