Wisconsin Election Abomination

Wisconsin held a Democratic primary election (Biden v. Sanders, with Biden a heavy favorite and the result not really in doubt) on April 7, 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Ten other states that were scheduled to hold primaries in early April had pushed the dates until later in the year, when the worst of the pandemic was expected to have passed, but the Republican House and Senate in Wisconsin refused to change the date -- in the face of heavy Democratic opposition.

The Democratic governor of the state took executive action at the last minute -- Saturday, April 4, in a special session -- to order the election postponed. The Republicans controlling the House and Senate immediately appealed to the Republican Supreme Court of Wisconsin to overturn the action, and were successful; it was ordered on Monday, April 6, that the election proceed the next day.

To top it off, also on Monday, April 6, the day before the election, the Supreme Court of the U.S. (that is, the Kavanaugh Court) ruled to overturn a Wisconsin move that mail-in absentee ballots be accepted beyond the 8 p.m. Tuesday closing of the polls, although by that time the election staff, overwhelmed by unprecedented requests for 1.2 million mail-in ballots, had not even finished sending them out.

All this was naked partisanship on the part of Wisconsin Republicans to force the election to be held during the height of the pandemic and therefore to suppress large numbers of votes. The reason they were so desperate to suppress the vote as much as possible was that on the same ballot as the Democratic primary, another choice on the ticket was between a Democratic challenger and an extreme conservative Republican incumbent for a seat on the State Supreme Court (thereby hoping to maintain the conservative Republican 5-2 majority). Republicans feared that under normal circumstances, hundreds of thousands of voters would turn out to vote for their Democratic presidential candidate -- and while they were there would pull the lever for the Democratic Supreme Court candidate.

The election went ahead, and it was a disgrace -- particularly in Milwaukee, the largest city in the state, where the electorate is only 35% white, but 40% black and 20% Hispanic or Latino. In the previous state election, Milwaukee, with a population of about 600,000, had 180 polling places; this time there were 5. Madison, Wisconsin, with a population of about 260,000, had 92 polling sites during the last election; this time, it had 66.

66 polling sites for a city of 260,000 and 5 for a city of 600,000? What's going on here? Republican election officials claimed that they could not find enough poll workers willing to risk their health to man the polling sites, but that was a lie; there were a great number of emails and tweets from people expressing their outrage at the decision and a willingness to serve as poll workers.

The election in Wisconsin on April 7 was a travesty, a shameful episode in the history of the state. The Republican majority in the House and Senate deserve to be overwhelmingly defeated in the next election.