As Heather Cox Richardson explains in today’s Letters from an American, the Wisconsin story is complicated but ultimately about voter disenfranchisement. To summarize, Wisconsin’s Republican legislature passed a voter-ID law that led to 200,000 fewer voters in 2016 than 2012. Trump won Wisconsin by less than 23,000 votes. A new move would drop another 240,000 voters. (More on this below). Republicans target people of color with these schemes. They would like the new voter suppression scheme in place for 2020 and the matter is tangled up in the state courts. Today’s election includes a race in which the Republican state supreme court candidate, should he win, will uphold implementation of the voter suppression measure for use in fall 2020.
There is a stay at home order in Wisconsin. More than a million voters have requested absentee ballots but the state is unable to process all of them. Many polls won’t open because workers fear the virus. In heavily Democratic and minority Milwaukee, only five of 180 polls were expected to open. The Wisconsin Supreme Court blocked the Democratic governor’s attempt to postpone the election. The United States Supreme Court refused to permit an extension of the time to receive absentee ballots which, to quote Justice Ginsburg in dissent, “will result in massive disenfranchisement.”
Effectively the Court is disenfranchising voters in an election the outcome of which will be to further disenfranchise them. News outlets this morning showed long lines of people lining up to vote. They are effectively risking their lives for democracy.
Think there’s always a Massachusetts connection? There is. The method Wisconsin Republicans want to use is called “voter caging.” It involves sending registered letters to voters in Democratic districts and moving to purge from voter rolls those whose letters are returned undelivered. According to the Brennan Center for Justice’s Guide to Voter Caging, the technique is “notoriously unreliable.” Also, “Voter caging is almost always pursued with partisan aims, and caging lists are often targeted expressly at registered members of the opposing party. Moreover, the practice has often been targeted at minority voters, making the effects even more pernicious.”
Who in Massachusetts would be so devious, unprincipled, and immoral to use such a discriminatory invasion of democratic rights? The Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance (ties to Kochs and Mercers). It used voter caging in trying to get its founder Rick Green elected to Congress in 2018. Unless we want to go to sleep in Massachusetts some night and awaken in Wisconsin the next morning, we must take heed. See Dan Kaufman’s The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics.
The Supreme Court has vacated key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, allowed partisan gerrymandering to favor Republicans, sacralized unlimited political spending by oligarchs, and now disenfranchised Wisconsin voters. At each step of the way this has benefited the Republican Party, a party no longer able to command a majority in elections, or for its policies. If democracy doesn’t work for the rich, the Court seems to be saying, then democracy shouldn’t work at all.
“And the courts gave them justice as justice is given by well-mannered thugs.”—Christy Moore, No Time for Love
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about oligarchy and democracy.]
Photo: New York Times
Outstanding post. Erosion of voting rights is the number one issue in today’s politics. That picture (above) – is worth a thousand words……
We need to work to reverse this. We can do it. Democracy is in the balance.