Sounds Innocuous - But Is Insidious

So this blurb from the New York Times talks about, but doesn't explain, the Primary Voting today in Wisconsin. This is how Republicans are contorting themselves to disenfranchise voters.

That all sounds relatively middle of the road, right. Let's break this down.

First, Republicans are banking on low turnout. Historically, the lower the turnout, the better for Republicans. Their base, old white people, tend to vote all the time. On the other hand, younger, browner people tend not to vote when they have duties, jobs and work on a Tuesday. To make this worse, Wisconsin has closed a ton of voting locations - often in minority areas. So IF non-white, older voters can get off work and go vote, then have farther to go.

In Wisconsin's most diverse city of Milwaukee, that meant going from 112 voting locations last primary, to 18 today. Poorer people don't have transportation and mass transit is closed.

Due to the lock down, the Wisconsin governor tried to move the election to June when more people could vote. This is, after all, a primary for an election that will not happen until November.

But this primary also has a vote for the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (yes many states vote for their Supreme Court Judges). Right now there is a 5-2 Republican/ Conservative majority to Democratic/Liberal. The man up for this vote will keep Wisconsin very conservative, if he wins. So the Republicans are doing everything they can to win.

The (Democratic) Governor tried to move the primary and was turned down by the State Supreme Court. Then the Governor fought to have mail-in voting, due to the lockdown. The Republicans control one of the state legislative bodies, and so they stalled and stalled and finally agreed to let people vote absentee / by mail. They agreed two weeks ago, AFTER the deadline for requesting an absentee ballot was passed.

After wrangling, the legislature did allow people to request absentee ballots by last Wednesday.  They are still processing those requests.

The US Supreme Court just overturned a provision that would extend when the absentee ballots can be returned. The rules were changed to allow voting until next week (April 14). The Supreme Court just sided with the Republicans (in a 5-4 all Republican vote) that ballots must be post-marked by tonight, April 7th. Why is that a problem.  Ballots haven't all gone out yet. And social distancing rules mean that getting a witness to sign is tough, even when they do get them.

Think of that. The US Supreme Court just held that ballots THAT HAVEN'T BEEN DELIVERED YET, must be returned and postmarked by today.  That is what 5 Republican appointed Supreme Court Justices says is a fair election.

So rigged voting should allow the State Supreme Court to stay Republican 5-2.

You may ask how I know that mail-in voting helps Democrats. Because Republicans SAY SO! With Trump, they now say the quiet part out loud!