SCOTUS has committed an act of brazen voter disenfranchisement. Wisconsin is a GOP prototype for the November election.
From the New York Times: “The stakes were apparent in the lawyers involved in the Supreme Court fight. The Democratic team included the party’s top election lawyer, Marc Elias; among the law firms representing the Republicans was Consovoy McCarthy. The firm is currently helping Mr. Trump to fight congressional demands for his tax returns, and a named partner helped argue a 2013 Supreme Court case that gutted the powerful protections of the Voting Rights Act.”
This is the problem:
There has been a battle for weeks going on between the GOP-majority legislature and the Democratic Governor. The legislature has more power over election laws in Wisconsin.
The GOP-led legislature reinstated the in-person election — which the governor postponed earlier by Executive Order — although there are almost no poll workers to conduct the election. Thousands of poll workers have dropped out for fear of contracting the virus, forcing cities to close dozens of polling places. Milwaukee, for example, consolidated its polling locations from 182 to five, while Green Bay consolidated its polling locations from 31 to two.
The National Guard is expected to run the election polling locations. But what will happen if there are only small numbers of locations?
Republican Party Resists Absentee or Mail-In Voting
Remember this from last week:
Trump has raised concern that making it easier to vote would hurt the GOP. In an interview on “Fox & Friends” last week, he criticized a coronavirus-related funding proposal from Democrats that would have provided more money for mail-in voting.
Referring to the $2 trillion Coronavirus stimulus bill, “The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said (referring to the Coronavirus stimulus bill). “They had things — levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Trump’s Republican allies echoed the sentiment, including in tweets like one from Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky: “Universal vote by mail would be the end of our republic as we know it.”
From the NYTimes:
“Mr. Trump, who registered to vote by mail in the Florida primary, appeared to be referring to the proposed expansion of early voting when he complained that Democrats ‘had things in there about election days,” which he called “totally crazy.’”
Did you notice that?
Trump registered to vote by mail in the Florida primary. So, Trump wants to be able to vote by mail but he doesn’t want other people to be able to. This is hypocrisy.
Facts About Voting By Mail
- The process for Absentee voting is the same as the process for Mail-in-ballot voting.
- Every state allows Absentee voting.
- All members of the Armed Services deployed outside the United States vote by mail.
- Several states do all their voting by mail. No one in the Federal government has a problem with that. Not even Trump.
- Trump’s “voter fraud commission” disbanded because it could not find any voter fraud.
- REPUBLICANS committed the only instance of “ballot harvesting” — Trump’s alleged concern with mail-in voting — in North Carolina in 2018.
Obviously, Trump and the 5 “conservative” members of SCOTUS know that high voter turnout — expression of the will of Americans — is bad for Republicans. Which is why Trump and the GOP are doing everything possible to suppress voting. Wisconsin is a GOP prototype for actions that will affect many state primaries and ultimately the national presidential election.
Said another way:
“We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”