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| Morry Gash - A.P. |
The voting situation in Wisconsin is truly horrifying. People are standing in long lines, in crowds, endangering their health and lives, despite a stay at home order from their governor. You see, the Supreme Court of the United States would not extend absentee voting for a week nor allow late received ballots to be counted for an extra week.
Due to postal problems because of the Covid -19 situation, many of the people in Wisconsin didn't even receive the absentee ballots they requested until after the April 7th deadline. State elections officials had been warning about the problem for weeks, such as being short 600,000 absentee ballot envelopes statewide. Now these absentee ballots will not be counted and people are being forced to leave quarantine to vote.
This did not matter to Wisconsin Republicans, nor to the GOP controlled State Supreme Court, or to the Republican majority SCOTUS, who split on ideological lines once again. They know that high voter turnouts are bad for the GOP so they concoct all sorts of reasons for suppressing it, including fake voter fraud warnings that never turn out to be substantiated whatsoever. And now they force people into making a decision between choosing their representatives and risking their lives. My hat is off to them for having the courage to vote.
I am livid about this.
10 comments:
I am livid also. I think that it is a really assault on our democratic traditions!
Sure will be fun if it backfires on them Republicans. There is no precedent to compare this to, so who knows how it will go. We will all know tonight or in a few days.
If we want the traditional election profile of voters adding mail in ballots to in person voting could preserve that. It is easy to fight attempts to move, postpone or cancel in person elections on constitutional grounds and I think that is what the power dynamic is here. However mail in ballot is fully constitutional.
The red and blue states divide with red avoiding mail in and blue promoting it. So, I guess it is a state by state battle.
Odd thing about the "silly season", one gets two or three as many chances to get furious as in the other times.
It’s all about politics, isn’t it?
It's a travesty and a tragedy. Not only puts their election results in question, but it endangers all the people who came out to vote. I'm with John Harwood, I hope it backfires on the conservatives who pushed this.
Well actually, there is a precedence. The 1918 mid term elections in the midst of the second (and most deadly wave) of the Spanish Flu in the U.S. continued on despite the killing pandemic. October of 1918 was the deadliest outbreak in U.S. History. But what was delayed (of all things) was the Wisconsin Senate race after the Democratic incumbent died in a duck-hunting accident (killed by his brother) two weeks prior to the November, 1918 vote.
That said, I wish the WI Gov (or courts) had pushed this year’s primary back to June. Each State has it own set of voting rules in these matters, and some governors have, or have not the authority to change the dates.
By the way, that senator’s death eventually changed the balance of power in the upper house to the republicans, and ended President Wilson’s progressive agenda and hopes of a second term.
A precedence of supreme stupidity it seems. Thanks for the comment, Phantom.
OK then Phantom.
I am also Livid, and I resent your co-opting my name. Knock it off.
Livid Schwartz
The Supreme Court was asked to decide a very specific narrow legal issue. They went out of their way to emphasize that their decision is on that matter, not the wisdom of holding a primary during a pandemic. I am not sure why so many appear to hold the State governments harmless in all of these matters. This was a complete failure of the state government that they tried to mitigate by breaking the law. The supreme court does not exist to remedy politicians stupidity, but to decide matters of constitutional law.
I completely disagree. They knew the real world implications of their actions, massive disenfranchisement. As bad as the actions of both sides of the state legislature were, the SCOTUS forced people who wanted to exercise their vote to endanger themselves in a time of pandemic.
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