As they say, if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.
Bradcast: WI's Democratic Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes was being overly polite when she tweeted today: "Good morning and welcome to the Shit Show! Today's episode has been produced by the Supreme Court and directed by the incomparable Speaker and Senate Majority leader duo," before adding: "Buckle up, this one's sure to disappoint!" She was being too kind in her reference to the 4 to 2 party-line vote that yesterday evening overturned an Executive Order that would have postponed today's election in the Badger State until June, as issued by Democratic Governor Tony Evers. The case which blocked that order was brought to the state Supreme Court by GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald, both representing "majorities" in their respective state chambers thanks to Republican gerrymandering that prevented Democrats from controlling the state legislature despite receiving more votes than Republicans.
New York Times: Wisconsin Primary Recap: Voters Forced to Choose Between Their Health and Their Civic Duty
"“People are going to be wondering about the authenticity of the vote no matter what because of the politicalization,” said Patty Schachtner, a Democratic state senator from St. Croix County who made her own mask to wear during a six-hour stint as a poll worker. Other poll workers, she said, had no protection at all…. In Milwaukee, where just five of 180 polling sites remained open, voters who hadn’t already cast absentee ballots — an overwhelmingly black and Hispanic population — waited in lines for hours.“
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/us/politics/wisconsin-primary-election.html
Wisconsin Primary Recap: Voters Forced to Choose Between Their Health and Their Civic Duty
The state was the first to hold a major election with in-person voting since stay-at-home orders were widely instituted because of the coronavirus.
By The New York Times
• April 7, 2020
Voters faced long lines, confusion and risk of infection as Wisconsin’s elections, including presidential primaries, took place in spite of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I cannot in good conscience allow any types of gathering that would further the spread of this disease and to put more lives at risk. There is not a sufficiently safe way to administer in-person voting tomorrow.” “I am 65. I’m a Type 2 diabetic. I have had heart issues. I mean, those are the risk factors they say can make it more serious.” “I actually think that it’s suppressive and dangerously irresponsible that the Legislature hasn’t either delayed the election or made it all mail-in ballot. I had a moment where I just really was not sure that I could do this. I woke up crying.” “We have some best practices things set up in there with a Plexiglas shield between the voter and the poll workers. We’re going to have masks available, gloves available, hand sanitizer. But it’s still going to be something that is a risk.” “We normally use 13 different polling locations. We normally have 300 poll workers to staff those locations. As of 10 days ago, we were down to 40.”
In Milwaukee, citizens were forced to choose between following public health orders to stay home and stand in line for hours at one of just five polling places the city kept open amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Across the state along the St. Croix River, a state senator who is her county’s chief medical examiner brought a homemade face mask to the polls because she didn’t want to take a surgical mask from her co-workers who will have to inspect the bodies of people who die from the coronavirus.
And everywhere in between, Wisconsinites reported an array of problems with absentee ballots. Some didn’t arrive, some couldn’t be legally witnessed and others were afraid to venture outside their homes to return their ballots by Tuesday night’s deadline.
It added up to an election almost certain to be tarred as illegitimate and contested by whichever side loses — especially if the conservative State Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly wins a full 10-year term.
“People are going to be wondering about the authenticity of the vote no matter what because of the politicalization,” said Patty Schachtner, a Democratic state senator from St. Croix County who made her own mask to wear during a six-hour stint as a poll worker. Other poll workers, she said, had no protection at all.
That Wisconsin’s leaders, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and the Republicans in charge of state legislative majorities, Robin Vos, the Assembly speaker, and Scott Fitzgerald, the State Senate majority leader, could not come to an agreement on how to alter the election is an epic and predictable failure.
It follows a decade of bitter partisan wrangling that saw former Gov. Scott Walker and his G.O.P. clinically attack and defang the state’s Democratic institutions, starting with organized labor and continuing with voting laws making it far harder for poor and black residents of urban areas to vote.
Like so much else in Wisconsin, Tuesday’s vote brought divisions along partisan and geographical lines. In Milwaukee, where just five of 180 polling sites remained open, voters who hadn’t already cast absentee ballots — an overwhelmingly black and Hispanic population — waited in lines for hours.
Elsewhere in the state, especially in areas that have not yet been hit hard by the outbreak, officials reported shorter lines and polling sites that remained open for business as usual.
“We have people, out of the kindness of their heart, have volunteered to drive around and witness ballots and deliver them to the clerk’s office,” said Matt Lederer, the Democratic Party chairman in Outagamie County, in the Fox Valley between Milwaukee and Green Bay. “We’re making phone calls and we're doing our best but so far, I’m hearing that the turnout seems low.”
Republicans, meanwhile, said they knew of few problems outside of Milwaukee, which has long been portrayed by the state’s conservatives as the source of Wisconsin’s problems. There was little sympathy.
“Everybody had a fair opportunity to vote,” said Dennis Gasper, the Republican Party chairman in Sheboygan County. “Nobody’s having a problem voting. I went by a number of our polling places and there’s no lines out in the country.”
Black voters in Milwaukee are hit hardest by coronavirus.
Milwaukee is the epicenter of Wisconsin’s coronavirus pandemic, and the black community in Milwaukee is among the most ravaged. As of Tuesday afternoon, Milwaukee county’s coronavirus dashboard showed black Americans made up 626 of the county’s 1,387 confirmed cases, and 36 of its 51 deaths.
The numbers informed the fear among residents who decided to vote Tuesday, braving crowds and even some hail to cast their ballots. Milwaukee had a massive drop off in poll workers ahead of Tuesday’s election, forcing the city to close all but five of its polling station. Some residents had to wait more than two hours, while covering their faces with makeshift masks and trying to maintain proper social distancing.
“Everything has changed,” said Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a native of Milwaukee. “And folks had more time to figure this out, and we don’t.”
Mr. Barnes said it was already clear that the coronavirus pandemic had upended the state’s political landscape. He said the city should be commended for releasing such race-driven data on the virus, and that elected officials had to be creative in their solutions moving forward, as typical forms of political organizing, like rallies or door-knocking, won’t work.
“Covid-19 has taken the day. It’s front and center and everything that we’re dealing with,” he said. “I just don’t know how you break through the ice that is coronavirus.”
“Because even when you move to a mostly digital organizing model, there’s still a digital divide that exists,” he added. “And there’s a real fear that folks won’t be able to get the right information or that those people could be overloaded with misinformation.”
Long lines also plague voting in Green Bay.
Long lines weren’t just confined to polling locations in Milwaukee.
In Green Bay, the third largest city in Wisconsin, polling locations were reduced from 31 on a normal Election Day to just two on Tuesday, as only 17 poll workers of the city’s roster of 270 were able to work.
At West High School, the line “went along the parking lot, snaked back up and went around the building,” said Seth Hoffmeister, 29, who lives in Green Bay. “I got out to film it but the line was so long I had to get back in my car to film the rest.”
Mr. Hoffmeister, who voted early, does political organizing work for the Wisconsin Conservation Voters, and had been hearing from field organizers throughout the day of long lines in Green Bay.
“A gentleman that lives in Green Bay and has C.O.P.D. wore a mask to go vote at East High School at 7 a.m. and he got back from the polls around 10 a.m.,” Mr. Hoffmeister said, reading an email from one of his organizers. “And the lines were even longer when he left than he arrived.”
Green Bay was one of the first cities to begin taking aggressive action to try to postpone the Wisconsin primary, filing a lawsuit against the state on March 25 seeking to delay the primary.
“The city is finding it functionally impossible to comply with both the Wisconsin Election Commission’s established procedures for administering the election and the directives of health officials,” the legal complaint, written more than two weeks ago, said.
Many voters say their absentee ballots never arrived.
Across Wisconsin, would-be voters complained that the absentee ballots they requested had never arrived in the mail, even though figures released by the state seemed to indicate the problem was not widespread.
Representative Gordon Hintz, the Democratic minority leader in the State Assembly, said there may have been a glitch in the system, perhaps because of overwhelmed elections offices. “It appears that people who requested their ballots between March the 20th and 24th, or maybe the 25th, have not received their ballots,” Mr. Hintz said.
Official state figures showed that of 1,282,762 ballots requested, 1,273,374 had been sent, a shortfall of about 9,000. Voters had returned 864,750 ballots by Tuesday morning. (Only 249,500 absentee ballots were issued in the spring 2016 election.)
But Mr. Hintz estimated that hundreds, if not thousands, of voters in his Oshkosh district alone had not received the ballots they asked for, leaving them in a predicament over whether to vote in person and risk contracting or spreading the coronavirus.
One of them was Mr. Hintz himself, who had decided not to vote Tuesday because the ballot he requested on March 22 had not arrived. The Wisconsin Elections Commission’s website says it was mailed to him on March 24.
Roger Luhn, a psychiatrist in Milwaukee, said Tuesday that he was also among the voters who had not received an absentee ballot.
“According to the website, they mailed the ballot to me on March 23,” said Dr. Luhn, who is medical director of a psychiatric hospital. “Yesterday, I gave up. I called the election commission. They put you on extended hold.”
Dr. Luhn said he would not go to the polls on Tuesday out of concern for his family, his patients and his fellow staff members. “There is no good outcome for today’s election,” he said. “No matter what happens, not enough people will have had an opportunity to safely cast their ballots.”
Voters encounter long lines — and social distancing.
The effects of shuttering so many polling sites in Milwaukee were immediately apparent on Tuesday morning: Across the city, lines stretched for blocks even before 7 a.m. local time.
On the South Side of the city, the parking lot of Alexander Hamilton High School was already full as daylight broke. By 8 a.m., more than 300 voters waited in a line that snaked through the parking lot and down the street.
At other locations nearby that would have normally been open for voting, signs were posted directing voters to Hamilton High School. But many of the locations were in heavily immigrant neighborhoods, predominantly Spanish or Hmong, and the only signs posted were in English.
At Marshall High School, in the northern part of Milwaukee, the line stretched for more than three blocks, with voters keeping six feet of space between each other. Most wore masks or other facial coverings.
The northern part of the city, which is predominantly black, has been hit the hardest by the coronavirus. Yet hundreds of voters had already queued by early morning.
The lines weren’t limited to Milwaukee. In Waukesha, a suburb just outside of Milwaukee, only one polling location was open for a city of 70,000. A similarly long line wrapped around a parking lot, as cones denoting a safe distance between voters helped break up the line.
A different scene outside Wisconsin’s cities.
Voting in Milwaukee was an unmitigated mess, but like so much else in Wisconsin, the scene is markedly different outside the main urban areas. Officials in rural counties — especially Republican officials — reported few problems at the polls and said they weren’t aware of people having problems voting absentee.
“I don’t know anyone personally who tried to get a ballot and didn’t get one,” said Rohn Bishop, the Republican Party chairman in Fond du Lac County. “I think turnout might actually be slightly higher than your typical spring election because there was such a push to get absentee ballots up.”
In Sheboygan County, about an hour north of Milwaukee up the Lake Michigan shore, Dennis Gasper, the local G.O.P. chairman, said he drove around local polling places Tuesday morning and found no issues.
“All the clerks have figured out how to deal with the coronavirus thing, so nobody should be having a problem voting,” he said.
Mr. Gasper said he was more focused on the prospect of “fraudulent voting” from Milwaukee and Madison, a well-worn concern of Wisconsin Republicans that has never been backed up by evidence. It was in fact rural voters, he argued, who were being disenfranchised because their local clerks did not offer as many days of early voting as did those in Milwaukee and Madison.
“I can tell you right now that you’re going to hear all about voter suppression, this is what they’re setting up to do, when in fact the Milwaukee and Madison voters had much more opportunity to vote than the rural communities did,” Mr. Gasper said. “That doesn’t stop them from making political points out of what would normally be a mundane election process.”
Beyond reduced polling sites and undelivered absentee ballots, another hurdle to voting.
Countless Wisconsinites were unable to vote Tuesday because local public health officials reduced polling sites or because municipal clerks were swamped by a record number of absentee ballot requests.
Still others found themselves disenfranchised by the state’s absentee voting laws, which require a witness signature before a ballot can be returned.
Jill Swenson, a 61-year-old literary agent, is self-quarantining in her Appleton home. A widow, she lives alone, suffers from a chronic lung disease and fears contracting the coronavirus.
“I received my ballot and was much surprised, since I had never voted absentee before, to discover there was a witness requirement,” Ms. Swenson said in a phone interview Tuesday.
“I don’t know anyone who has been self-isolating who could be a witness for me.”
Her neighbors, Ms. Swenson said, include an Appleton police officer, a factory worker and teenage boys who have been playing basketball in their driveway — no one with whom she felt comfortable sharing space and air.
She contacted the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the bipartisan state elections agency run by a former Republican state lawmaker, and was sent advice on how to find a witness.
The commission proposed Ms. Swenson have a witness come to her window, or watch her mark her ballot via FaceTime or Skype. Ms. Swenson would then have to sign her ballot, leave it outside her house, and have the witness sign and return it.
Then on April 2, U.S. District Judge William Conley waived the absentee witness requirement. Ms. Swenson put her ballot in the mail the next day.
But the Supreme Court on Monday night overturned Judge Conley’s ruling, reinstating the witness requirement. Ms. Swenson’s ballot, mailed three days earlier, will not count.
When she logged on to the state elections website to check the status of her ballot Tuesday, it said her completed ballot was not received.
Partisan brawling and a logistical tangle have led to chaos.
Like so much else in Wisconsin over the last decade, the state’s coronavirus response and opinions about moving the election broke along partisan lines.
Democrats, aiming to expand turnout especially in the state’s largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, sought to expand mail voting and delay the election until June. Republicans, wary of affording new powers to a Democratic governor and content with suppressing turnout in urban centers where the coronavirus has struck hardest, refused to entertain proposals for relief.
“Thousands will wake up and have to choose between exercising their right to vote and staying healthy and safe,” Gov. Tony Evers said Monday after the state’s Supreme Court blocked his effort to postpone the election.
But Dean Knudson, a Republican former state legislator who is chairman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said late Monday that voters who wished to participate in Tuesday’s contest would have no recourse but to venture to the polls — even if they had requested but had not yet received an absentee ballot.
“If they haven’t got their ballot in the mail,” he said, “they are going to have to go to the polling place tomorrow.”
Other Republicans have played down the danger to public health of voting during a pandemic. One Republican county chair, Jim Miller of Sawyer County, said the process would be similar to people picking up food to eat during the state’s stay-at-home order.
“If you can go out and get fast food, you can go vote curbside,” Mr. Miller said. “It’s the same procedure.”
Why were Wisconsin Republicans so adamant about holding Tuesday’s elections?
It’s not just a presidential primary on the ballot in Wisconsin. Also at stake is the makeup of the Wisconsin Supreme Court — the very court that struck down Mr. Evers’s effort to delay Tuesday’s elections.
Statewide races in Wisconsin tend to be close, and Supreme Court elections, which come with 10-year terms, are often even closer.
Last year Brian Hagedorn, a conservative judge, defeated a liberal challenger by less than 6,000 votes out of 1.2 million cast. In 2011, another conservative, David T. Prosser Jr., won by 7,000 votes after officials in Waukesha County found 14,000 overlooked ballots the day after the election.
For now, conservatives hold five of seven seats on the officially nonpartisan court. The incumbent in Tuesday’s contest, Justice Daniel Kelly, was appointed to replace Justice Prosser by Gov. Scott Walker in 2016 and is seeking his first full term. He faces Jill Karofsky, a circuit court judge.
President Trump has posted several messages on Twitter endorsing Justice Kelly in recent days.
If Justice Kelly wins, it will cement the conservative majority’s ability to block future Democratic efforts to change the state’s strict voting laws and litigate an expected stalemate over congressional and state legislative boundaries during post-2020 redistricting.
Liberals would need to flip just one of the conservatives’ votes if Judge Karofsky wins. Unless a justice retires or resigns, they would not have an opportunity to win a court majority until the 2023 elections.
Reporting was contributed by Astead W. Herndon from Milwaukee, Nick Corasaniti and Stephanie Saul from New York, and Reid J. Epstein from Washington.………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….'
Welcome to the Shit Show': WI and U.S. Supremes Force Choice Between Suppression or Pandemic: 'BradCast' 4/7/2020
Also: Petulant criminal Trump begins purge of Inspectors General…
On today's BradCast: Reprehensible and morally unjustifiable rulings by the Republican majorities on both the Wisconsin and U.S. Supreme Courts over the past 24 hours have resulted in tens of thousands of voters forced to choose between risking their lives to cast their ballots or face voter suppression today in Wisconsin. The GOP Justices on both courts now have blood on their hands. [Audio link to show is posted below.]
WI's Democratic Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes was being overly polite when she tweeted today: "Good morning and welcome to the Shit Show! Today's episode has been produced by the Supreme Court and directed by the incomparable Speaker and Senate Majority leader duo," before adding: "Buckle up, this one's sure to disappoint!" She was being too kind in her reference to the 4 to 2 party-line vote that yesterday evening overturned an Executive Order that would have postponed today's election in the Badger State until June, as issued by Democratic Governor Tony Evers. The case which blocked that order was brought to the state Supreme Court by GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald, both representing "majorities" in their respective state chambers thanks to Republican gerrymandering that prevented Democrats from controlling the state legislature despite receiving more votes than Republicans.
The state court's decision assured that WI voters faced potential death if they chose to vote in person at polling places (if they could find one open) in the middle of a deadly pandemic on Tuesday. The immoral decision was made even worse by the stolen Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court who, even later last night, in an unsigned 5 to 4 opinion [PDF] overturned a lower federal court judge's ruling [PDF] which had allowed 6 extra days for voters to return absentee ballots, given that tens of thousands of state voters have yet to even receive theirs due to the influx of requests amid the pandemic. Somehow, those voters are supposed to postmark or return them by today to be counted, even though many won't even receive the ballots for days after the April 7 election. It was, as Slate's Mark Joseph Stern writes, "one of the most brazen acts of voter suppression in modern history.”
Thus, tens of thousands of Wisconsin voters are now certain to be disenfranchised, thanks to the repugnant rulings by every Republican on both Courts. WI voters and those who know them may consider themselves lucky if voter suppression is the ONLY thing that happens to them after being forced to stand in lines that snaked for blocks and blocks (and blocks) before being forced to crowd into consolidated polling places for lack of poll workers willing to risk their own lives. (In Milwaukee, for example, instead of 182 polling places, there were just FIVE today.)
As you might imagine, my head has been repeatedly exploding over the past 24 hours. We describe on today's show what happened on Tuesday, why the state Supreme Court decided as they did (hint: it was to and ensure Republican majority control of the same state Supreme Court which issued this horrific ruling, for as far as the eye can see), why the U.S. Supreme Court decided as they did (hint: they invoked their absurd "Purcell Principle" in order to allow voter suppression to continue across the country this fall and beyond), and what all of this now horrendously portends for upcoming elections in the 20+ states which previously postponed their primaries due to the COVID-19 crisis and for the 50 states that will be running the most critical election in our nation's history --- pandemic or no pandemic --- this November 3rd.
None of this is a good sign for free and fair elections in a supposed representative democracy. All of it brings same and disgrace to the GOP and their followers...if they are capable of either.