UPDATE: On Monday, April 6, Gov. Evers signed an executive order suspending in-person voting and directing the state's legislative bodies into a special session to be held Tuesday, April 7. Later in the day, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered for the election to take place as planned.
During what the president and his advisors warn could be one of the deadliest weeks in American history, national attention also will be focused on the political negligence of Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Legislature for irresponsibly refusing to delay its presidential primary and other elections and expand voting by mail to protect state voters and poll workers.
“This is going to be the hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives, quite frankly,” U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said Sunday on Fox News. “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized. It’s going to be happening all over the country.”
And Wisconsin will be the only one of 11 states originally scheduled to hold presidential primaries and other elections in April that haven’t postponed or dramatically altered voting to protect voters and poll workers during the worst public health pandemic in U.S. history.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was criticized by some in his own party for not fighting aggressively enough against repeated refusals of Republican legislators to comply with medical experts by delaying the elections or provide voting by mail for everyone advised to stay home and avoid public contact to slow the rapidly mounting death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic.
GOP-vs.-Public Health
But over the weekend, Wisconsin Republicans arrogantly demonstrated once again how immovable they were. Only one Republican legislator even bothered to show up for an emergency session of the Legislature Evers called on Saturday to try to head off the public health and election disaster still scheduled for Tuesday. The Senate and Assembly sessions lasted only seconds with Republicans declining even to consider protecting public health or voting rights in the state.
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The reason has been obvious for years: Republicans really don’t care what happens to anyone who doesn’t vote for them or protecting voting rights for all Americans. They care only about rewarding their friends and protecting the voting rights of Americans who vote Republican.
This radical, basically unAmerican political position actually predates President Trump’s contempt for any Democrat who criticizes him. In recent years, Republican election success has depended upon corrupt gerrymandering to distort the will of the voters, strict requirements for specific forms of voter ID many Democratic voters don’t possess and creating other barriers to voting to disenfranchise as many opposition voters as possible.
When their primary interest is reducing voting by Democrats, why would Wisconsin Republicans delay an election during a deadly pandemic? It’s a political bonus that the most devastating effects are in crowded urban areas teeming with Democratic voters. With poll workers fearing for their own lives, Milwaukee’s usual 180 polling places have been reduced to only five. Those could conceivably be jammed with tens of thousands of voters with no way to safely separate long lines of voters to prevent the spread of a deadly contagion.
Clearly the safest way to protect every citizen’s right to vote during this extraordinarily dangerous time would be to provide every registered voter in Wisconsin a postage-paid, return-mail ballot. There would have to be safeguards to secure voting and provide ballots to voters with unreliable mail service. All-mail voting is exactly what Evers has proposed saying, “No one should have to choose between their health and the right to vote.”
Vote by Mail
Republicans object with the same lie used to require specific forms of voter identification. They claim they’re fighting vote fraud without any evidence that is more than infinitesimal in the U.S. from the few cases ever charged by zealous Republican prosecutors. President Trump himself accidentally told the truth about Republican opposition to mail-in voting. Republicans have more difficulty winning elections when more voters cast ballots as they did in 2018. Trump opposed including funds sought by both Republican and Democratic election officials to expand safe mail voting in the $2 trillion coronavirus relief law saying, “If you agreed to it (all mail-in voting) you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
There is something curiously out of sync about Wisconsin Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald continuing minimize the danger of forcing state voters out in public to vote. Vos has even raised the foolish idea Trump has now dropped of packing Wisconsin churches on Easter. It’s almost as if state Republican didn’t get Trump’s memo to pretend to take the deadly pandemic seriously now.
After more than two months of inaction and discounting the national danger from the coronavirus, Trump is now admitting the ultimate death toll could quadruple those 58,000 names engraved on the horrible black wall in Washington memoralizing the U.S. victims of an earlier national tragedy. That was the one when our president repeatedly made exactly the same promise to the American people using exactly the same words Trump spoke Sunday: “We’re starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.”
