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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Many also waited in the rain:
This line was outside a high school where the fence is decorated with memorials to a coach who died recently from covid-19. These voters stood outside in the rain during a pandemic with the memorial signs serving as a constant reminder of how deadly the coronavirus is.
https://www.jsonline.com/picture-gallery/news/local/milwaukee/2020/04/08/crowd-waiting-line-vote-washington-high-school-braved-rain-and-coronavirus-hot-spot/2974555001/
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https://www.mywabashvalley.com/washington/washington-dc/black-voters-weigh-history-health-as-they-vote-in-wisconsin/
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People will probably die and get sick trying to vote. The GOP is evil.
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do you really trust a computer voting app? somethings, no matter how imperfect, are really to be done in person!
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@ v8driver
No, I don’t, but Oregon for example has been on a vote-by-mail system for years using paper ballots. Computers are not the only option.
People tried to vote absentee in Wisconsin but they had to request an absentee ballot, and many hadn’t gotten theirs yet. Part of the problem was high demand, and the election officials in some places got behind in filling the requests.
But there were other problems, too. There were precincts that mailed absentee ballots out three weeks ago and yet many never arrived. One village mailed out the absentee ballots and the post office returned them all to city hall in a big plastic bulk mail container, marked as being undeliverable as addressed. City officials went to the local post office to ask why — what was wrong with how the envelopes were addressed or metered — and the postal workers there had no idea; it looked fine to them. Last I read, the city officials have not been able to get an answer from the higher-ups at USPS.
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I read this morning that the only reason so many people in the photos of Milwaukee were wearing masks is because the city health department was there handing them out. I’d been wondering about that since the masks are so hard to find now.
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ppl r wearing masks here in philly now today even
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$2 @ the papi store i keep tellin him to get some guantes
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it’s a bottom line to everything
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@ Solitaire
Exactly!
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I guess most people don’t have any crafting abilities or basic materials to make their own quality masks to be washed and reused….
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A recent article in The Conversation discussed how closing polling places is an updated form of the poll tax. According to the article:
https://theconversation.com/closing-polling-places-is-the-21st-centurys-version-of-a-poll-tax-133301
Now the Repubs are not content with time/wage theft, they also want potential Democratic voters to risk their lives during a raging pandemic.
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“Now the Repubs are not content with time/wage theft, they also want potential Democratic voters to risk their lives during a raging pandemic.”
I know they’re banking on the fact people won’t. But could you imagine the global news cycle if all 600,000 people had lined up at the 5 polling places, 6′ apart? If we allow for 2-3 feet of “personal space”, that would have yielded lines over 150 miles long. Scenes like that would make world news if only because other countries would love to throw it in our face how bad we are at practicing the democracy we champion.
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@ Open Minded Observer
“…other countries would love to throw it in our face how bad we are at practicing the democracy we champion”
And they would be right to do so.
In the supposed “dictatorship” of Venezuela, there are numerous polling places with open access for poll watchers, both foreign and domestic. Venezuela uses paper ballots, exclusively. Those paper ballots are counted in full public view with no restrictions on election observers.
The Repubs and the Dems would both melt into a steaming puddles of goo (a la Wicked Witch of the West) before they allowed that level of electoral transparency in the USA.
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Jill Karofsky won ten year seat in Wisconsin Supreme Court.
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https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/21/839865567/milwaukee-claims-7-coronavirus-cases-tied-to-controversial-election
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