Wisconsin's Warning for the November Election

[Celerity]

How are people expected to vote if they’re not supposed to even leave their homes?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/wisconsin-election-coronavirus/609496/



“I’m accused of trying to conduct a voter purge in the state of Wisconsin,” Rick Esenberg told me by way of introduction. Esenberg runs the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which is suing to force the state’s election commission to remove hundreds of thousands of “inactive” voters from the rolls.

I had called Esenberg to ask about the in-person election that Wisconsin was planning to hold tomorrow even as its citizens are under a statewide directive to stay at home amid the coronavirus outbreak. Democrats, including Governor Tony Evers, want to conduct the election by mail so that Wisconsinites don’t have to risk their health to go to the polls. The Republican-controlled state legislature is rejecting that idea—even though some studies suggest that voting by mail helps Republican candidates more than Democratic ones.

Why would Republicans oppose a measure that could make it easier—and safer—for people to vote? They’ve cited the logistical and legal hurdles of mailing every Wisconsin voter a ballot in such a short period. But at the heart of the dispute is a disagreement over the fundamental goal of the proposal—maximizing the number of people who can exercise their right to vote. “I’m not one of these people who says that’s necessarily an unalloyed good,” Esenberg told me. “To some extent, I do believe that if people are not willing to make some effort to vote, maybe that indicates that they’re not that interested and they’re not going to inform themselves, and it’s just as well that they don’t vote.”

To conservatives like Esenberg, prioritizing turnout as a benchmark is a mistake. “Should we evaluate the fairness of our voting laws simply by how many people vote, and that’s sort of the sign of a functioning democracy?” he said. “I don’t know that that’s true. Everybody votes in Cuba, but nobody thinks that’s a well-functioning democracy. I don’t worry as much about how many people vote. I think there’s a lot of people who aren’t particularly interested in voting.”

snip


they would once again try a poll tax (and this time it would be far more expansive in terms of states involved) if they thought they could get away with it