Wisconsin Votes Today Regardless of COVID 19
Curbside Voting Information – Wisconsin
– Election Day, Tuesday, April 7 –
All Absentee Ballots must be postmarked TODAY or dropped off in-person.
In this order, a decision came hours after the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned Gov. Tony Evers’s (D) executive order to postpone Tuesday’s vote, sowing confusion in a critical election featuring a Democratic presidential primary and a pivotal state Supreme Court seat. A Monday night SCOTUS decision ruled Wisconsin can not accept absentee ballots postmarked after election day April 7th.
Along the same old ideological lines, the “conservative-5″ justices sided with Republican state lawmakers and halted a lower federal court order to extend absentee voting to April 13 to avoid in -person voting amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The wording? “’Extending the date by which ballots may be cast by voters — not just received by the municipal clerks but cast by voters — for an additional six days after the scheduled election day fundamentally alters the nature of the election,’ the majority opinion states, noting that the lower district court erred by providing such relief.”
In another decision: Purposely altering the congressional district boundaries from which ballots may be cast by voters — not just received by the municipal clerks but cast by voters – alters the ‘nature of the election,’ the majority opinion states, noting that the states can not redraw boundaries to back one political party over another.
Sorry my mistake on the later, SCOTUS said they will not become involved in political issues concerning elections except for when it means Repubs will win. How quick they can move their butts when it involves Republican politics.
The Supreme Court made accommodations for itself—but not for Wisconsin voters who must risk their lives to vote.
If there were still any doubters(there shouldn’t be), that this Supreme Court is going to radically change life in the US, this latest clusterfuck should convince them.
Have a nice day, Susan Sarandon.
This was brought up by another commenter elsewhere
“Once the receipt deadline is properly set as the 13th (as it has been here), what is there in Wisconsin law that would prohibit someone from mailing a valid (i.e., countable) ballot between the 7th and the 13th, or from delivering such a ballot to an election official on or before the 13th?” “Where the Supreme Court went wrong in today’s Wisconsin election decision (I think)”
“Once the receipt deadline is properly set as the 13th (as it has been here), what is there in Wisconsin law that would prohibit someone from mailing a valid (i.e., countable) ballot between the 7th and the 13th, or from delivering such a ballot to an election official on or before the 13th?”
Postmark is not needed according to Wisconsin law.
“The Court’s per curiam opinion proceeds as if there’s a background state law rule requiring voters to mail and postmark such ballots by the 7th (“as state law would necessarily require”)–but there’s not. (The Court writes that it is “a critical point in the case” that “in their preliminary injunction motions, the plaintiffs did not ask that the District Court allow ballots mailed and postmarked after election day, April 7, to be counted.” Well, perhaps the plaintiffs didn’t include such a request for relief in their papers because there was nothing in Wisconsin law that prohibited the counting of such ballots, and therefore there was no need for the District Court to issue an order “allow[ing]” it.)
No other law, that is, except the Supreme Court’s per curiam opinion itself: If my reading is correct, it is the U.S. Supreme Court, not Wisconsin law, that has now established April 7th as a legal deadline for mailing and postmarking ballots. The Court itself, in other words, has added such a restriction to the franchise that Wisconsin’s own state law does not impose.**
It’s how the GOP rolls. And it is because it is the only way for them to win elections these days.
“Republicans do not want more people to vote. This has been clear for close to a decade. After the Obama coalition swept to power in 2008 and retained the White House in 2012, Republicans had a choice: attempt to broaden their own coalition by appealing to new groups, like Hispanic voters and women, beyond their traditional base of older white Christians; or double down on the white Christian nationalism. They chose the latter, but because this made winning an actual majority of voters difficult, they had to prevent other groups from voting and dilute the power of those votes. The Party of Lincoln has, as a result, pursued a suite of policies aimed at rigging elections for their own benefit.
There are the voter-ID laws, cooked up on the pretense of combatting the non-existent problem of in-person voter fraud, but which in practice disproportionately suppress black voters and others who tend to support Democrats. In Texas, they gave away the game on this: a student ID from a college or university did not qualify you to vote, but a concealed-carry handgun license did. The purpose of these laws is to prevent potential Democratic voters from voting, which a Pennsylvania state legislator admitted in 2012 when he bragged that the state’s new ID law would deliver Pennsylvania for Mitt Romney. It didn’t, but that was the goal of the law….
In other cases, there’s even more straightforward voter suppression. Reuters found states across the South have closed 1,200 polling places since the Roberts Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. This leads to longer lines, even as some states scale back voting hours, all of which discourages people—particularly, say, hourly workers—from participating. By the time of the Georgia gubernatorial election in 2018, when Brian Kemp was running for governor while overseeing the election as secretary of state—this is known as a conflict of interest—huge numbers of polling places had been closed, often in poorer rural areas and counties with significant African-American populations. This was accompanied by a massive purge of the voter rolls, as more than 100,000 citizens were literally stripped of their voting rights in an initiative overseen by Kemp. Then there was the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a sprawling initiative overseen by Kris Kobach to purge Certain People from the voter rolls across multiple states.
There’s also the extreme gerrymandering, as Republicans seized power at the state level following the 2010 Census and—using new technology—drew congressional and district maps that either packed Democratic votes into as few areas as possible or spread them across many districts to dilute them. Democrats in some legislatures have done their own gerrymandering, but there is really no comparison in terms of the extreme tactics. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker lost his 2018 bid for re-election by one percentage point, but he carried 63 of 99 state legislative districts. Republicans got 46 percent of the vote in 2018, according to Ari Berman, but won 64 percent of the state legislative seats.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32079704/trump-vote-by-mail-corruption-republicans/
And it is the only reason that trump has any chance to win. Bad enough that the Senate is a 18th century joke and the House has a built in edge for the GOP.
Now they control the “polling judges”.
As a Wisconsin voter in Brown county, I think the US Supreme court got it right actually. The election was entirely illegitimate. The district court and the minority in the Supreme Court I think acted in what they viewed as good faith, so I will not describe them as anti-democratic judicial activists. But they would have contributed to making a terrible situation actually worse. The greater disenfranchisement of Wisconsin voters was creating a situation where those expecting to vote in-person were directed by the Governor not to go out in public and gather in large crowds. I do not think the Governor was acting in bad faith either with these directives at this time. My view is that any court decision trying to add any kind of legitimacy to this election was very wrong-headed. The virulent criticism of the court is actually a better democratic response than had the minority prevailed. The election should be declared invalid and the minority position would have made that marginally harder to arrive at.
As for not simply cancelling the election and establishing a new date, well blame for that is not entirely with the Republican legislature. The Governor did not make it explicitly clear that his proposal was an entire re-do, so as the issue was addressed, many understood it that early vote and the absentee balloting for April 7 was to be accepted as part of the election at TBA date in the future. That perception might have been inaccurate, but it was not clearly disowned by the Governor at the outset. The Governor has a lot on his plate right now, so I won’t attribute even that to some desire to gain a partisan advantage, but that is how it was viewed by many Republicans around the state.
For myself, I have never voted absentee in my life. I never considered applying for an absentee ballot. But, just like tens of thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of other Wisconsin voters, this election disenfranchised me on Tuesday by offering a devil’s bargain of voting and risking serious illness or not voting. Again, I do not claim that the minority acted in bad faith here, but anything that added a shred of legitimacy but did not address the true extent of the disenfranchisement was unhelpful.