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Winning elections in a democracy used to depend upon making widespread, popular appeals attracting as many voters as possible. Increasingly these days for Republicans, winning depends on using every trick imaginable to prevent those who won’t vote Republican from ever casting a ballot. That’s especially true when your president is Donald Trump, who refuses to appeal to anyone beyond those attending his all-white hate rallies roaring approval at his crude racism and vitriolic attacks on his perceived enemies. Then you really have to stop enormous numbers of Americans from exercising their right to vote.
It wasn’t just a coincidence that the same week an Ozaukee County judge ordered as many as 234,000 voters to be removed from Wisconsin’s voting rolls in response to a rightwing Republican lawsuit a federal judge in Georgia ordered another 300,000 voters stricken from that state’s voting rolls.
Wisconsin Republicans specifically targeted a list of voters heavily weighted toward residents of Milwaukee, Madison and college towns around the state. It’s obvious why. In 2016, Trump won Wisconsin’s electoral votes by only 22,748 votes. Republicans believe cancelling hundreds of thousands of voter registrations in Democratic areas could win a key swing state for Trump in November despite intense opposition in urban and suburban areas and Trump’s bankrupting of hundreds of Wisconsin farms with his destructive trade war.
Wisconsin’s just one small cog in a corrupt national scheme. The success of Republican voter suppression nationally hasn’t just tossed a few hundred thousand Americans off the voting rolls. It’s ended voter registration for millions—many who may not know it until they try to vote in November—too late in their states to re-register.
Corrupt State Courts
Ominously, Republican voter suppression schemes are beginning to win approval in many Republican state courts. Even worse, a major U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2018 upheld an Ohio “use-it-or-lose-it” law purging voters who fail to vote in a single federal election. That’s why Republican U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has essentially abandoned passing legislation to work nearly full time stocking federal court vacancies with unqualified, rightwing Trump appointees hellbent on destroying the nation’s non-partisan, independent judiciary, as well as democratic elections.
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It’s easy to see where the Wisconsin court case is headed. Republican former Gov. Scott Walker solidified a corrupt, rightwing majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court with partisan appointees who ultimately shutdown a criminal investigation into his administration. The rightwing Bradley Foundation-financed Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which filed the Republican lawsuit, can hardly wait to get there. But the Wisconsin Elections Commission, split evenly between Republican and Democratic appointees, is trying to avoid purging voters before November’s election by pursuing every legal appeal.
The good news is Walker and Republican legislators failed in their attempts to destroy same-day voter registration in Wisconsin. Even if the state Supreme Court upholds massive voter purges, voters who learn they’re no longer registered to vote when they show up on Election Day can re-register immediately.
Wisconsinites will have to fend off continuing Republican attempts to destroy their voting rights, especially insidious “use-it-or-lose-it” laws Republican-controlled states like Ohio and Georgia use to reduce voting by Democrats. Typically, voter purges start when citizens fail to vote in several elections. Ohio’s law is the most extreme, beginning after a voter misses only one federal election. The state mails postcards to missing voters requiring them to certify they reside at the same address to maintain their voter registrations.
(Wisconsin used a similar process to try to confirm the residencies of the 234,000 voters facing a possible purge but with one glaring omission: Voters were never warned their voter registration would be revoked if they failed to return the postcard.)
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s extreme law in 2018 in a five-to-four vote, with all five Republican-appointed justices approving the law, and the four Democratic-appointed justices dissenting; Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent pointed out the fatal flaw in the majority decision, citing Ohio’s actual practice.
In 2012, Breyer wrote, Ohio sent out 1.5 million notices to 20% of the state’s registered voters asking whether they had moved, even though statistically only about 4% of Americans move outside their counties each year. The state received back about 60,000 return cards (about 4%) confirming they’d moved. Another 235,000 returned cards saying the state was wrong; they hadn’t moved. More than a million recipients returned no cards at all. As a result, Breyer said, all of those voters were removed from the rolls, thanks in large part to “the human tendency not to send back cards received in the mail.”
Seriously, when was the last time you received anything important unsolicited in the mail, a service these days used primarily by junk mail advertisers? Constitutional voting rights are far too important to depend upon mail service in black and brown neighborhoods—precisely those communities Republicans are most eager to disenfranchise.
