Wisconsin's election was a voting rights and public health disaster

https://madison.com/ct/opinion/column/margaret-krome-wisconsins-election-was-a-voting-rights-and-public-health-disaster/article_c93aae7d-4f76-5440-9560-438c158ad734.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter



Margaret Krome: Wisconsin's election was a voting rights and public health disaster

By Margaret Krome | local columnist 14 hrs ago





Make no mistake about it — last week, Wisconsin voters were subjected to full-fledged, unapologetic, anti-patriotic voter suppression.

After efforts in 2018 to suppress the African American vote in Georgia through voter purging, restriction of voting hours in certain districts in Texas, and restrictions on translators in immigrant communities, we just became the focal point of a national Republican campaign to wrest electoral power by disenfranchisement. As the COVID-19 crisis deepened, not only did the Republican-led Wisconsin Legislature thumb its nose at Gov. Evers’ request to delay the election until later in the pandemic, when voters could more safely vote, but when he delayed it by executive order, the Republican majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned his action.

The national dimensions of Republican strategy became apparent when the majority Republican-appointed U.S. Supreme Court last week voted along party lines to oppose extending absentee voting in Wisconsin during this year’s pandemic-threatened spring election, overturning other federal courts that ordered or approved it. It was further confirmed when President Trump tweeted last week that absentee voting “doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” In other words, the more people who vote, the lower the chance that Republicans will hold power.

I submitted my absentee ballot well in advance of Wisconsin’s spring election last week, and I assume that it arrived without incident. The COVID pandemic was entrenched by the time I decided to vote by absentee ballot; our household had already spent two weeks in self-quarantine, so I was anxious not to expose myself again. Then began the email messages saying that election officials urgently needed more workers at the polls. I pondered it for a day and then volunteered to be a poll worker. My husband volunteered as well, as did our daughter, our son, and our son’s partner.


Our precinct was well-run and received a steady stream of voters all day. But the boxes of absentee ballots constituted the majority of votes counted in our location. Due to concerns about COVID-19 and insufficient poll-workers, two wards were handled at our location, each with its ballot-scanning machine. That night, when tallying votes, it became apparent that as poll workers had scanned absentee ballots, occasionally they mixed up the machine they should submit into, with a voter in one ward being scanned into the other ward’s machine — a simple error. Well after 9 p.m., every ballot cast, absentee or otherwise, had to be completely re-scanned. My daughter returned at midnight, and when my husband fell into bed after 2 a.m., he only said, “Every vote got counted,” and promptly fell asleep.

So our family is back to self-quarantine for two weeks — a minor matter in the scheme of things. Hopefully, nobody in our family gets COVID-19 from having worked the polls. But there are certain to be COVID-19 cases resulting from the long lines in Milwaukee and elsewhere. Those voters deserved protection from this virus................................

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Clerks set to count votes in messy Wisconsin election (copy)

City of Milwaukee Election Commission workers process absentee ballots Tuesday, April 7, 2020 in downtown Milwaukee, Wis. Despite federal health recommendations, thousands of Wisconsin voters waited hours in long lines outside overcrowded polling stations on Tuesday so they could participate in a presidential primary election that tested the limits of electoral politics in the midst of a pandemic. (Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP)
Mark Hoffman