Inside Wisconsin's Election Mess: Thousands of Missing or Nullified Ballots

[babylonsister]

Inside Wisconsin’s Election Mess: Thousands of Missing or Nullified Ballots
As Wisconsin scrambled to expand voting by mail for its election on Tuesday, many absentee voters said their ballots went undelivered.
By Nick Corasaniti and Stephanie Saul
April 9, 2020


Three tubs of absentee ballots that never reached voters were discovered in a postal center outside Milwaukee. At least 9,000 absentee ballots requested by voters were never sent, and others recorded as sent were never received. Even when voters did return their completed ballots in the mail, thousands were postmarked too late to count — or not at all.

Cracks in Wisconsin’s vote-by-mail operation are now emerging after the state’s scramble to expand that effort on the fly for voters who feared going to the polls in Tuesday’s elections. The takeaways — that the election network and the Postal Service were pushed to the brink of their capabilities, and that mistakes were clearly made — are instructive for other states if they choose to broaden vote-by-mail methods without sufficient time, money and planning.

More than 860,000 completed absentee ballots had been returned by Tuesday, already a record for Wisconsin spring elections. But for thousands of other voters, who never received their ballots, there was only one recourse: putting their health at risk and defying a stay-at-home order to vote in person during the coronavirus pandemic. Many chose not to show up.

Federal health officials have suggested that expanding voting by mail could help reduce crowds at polling places and therefore make elections safer amid the outbreak. The issues that have arisen in Wisconsin offer a warning for other states of the potential pitfalls of a rapid, last-minute expansion of absentee balloting, particularly one marred by a flurry of court challenges and 11th-hour rulings that created confusion and chaos.

The mix of missing and mismarked ballots suggests that thousands of Wisconsin voters were effectively disenfranchised, an issue that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of in her dissent to a Supreme Court decision on Monday that blocked extended absentee balloting in the state. Tens of thousands of people who did not receive their ballots in time, Justice Ginsburg wrote, “will be left quite literally without a vote.”

more...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/us/politics/wisconsin-election-absentee-coronavirus.html

[lark]

1. This happened on purpose due to repug treachery.

These anti-American fuckers are doing their dead level best to destroy our workers, our poor, and our way of life. They are doing a lot to seize permanent power and we are in deep peril. I really fear what drumpf will do with his 500 billion slush fund, after he pays himself a huge chunk of that $$, that is.

[Faux pas]

2. Kickin' with disgust!

[Iliyah]

3. Republicans will try and steal it, again. . . .

[stillcool]

4. as Gov Cuomo says...

Wisconsin is the canary in the coal mine.

[BSdetect]

5. Election corruption is so commonplace in this country.

The mind boggles.

And its 99% republicans involved.

[uponit7771]

8. +1, Republicans are no longer interested in liberal democracy one person one vote

[kacekwl]

6. WHY is it so flipping hard to hold a honest, competent

election in this country. Lost ballots, nullified ballots, ballots found weeks later in someone's trunk. Machine malfunctions Good grief.

[uponit7771]

7. K&R, Wisconsin was a trial run

[newblewtoo]

9. For those with time

Here is an article by the ACLU on Florida mail in voting. Florida has a history of voting problems as we know. Apparently the mail in voting is just exacerbating those problems.



https://www.aclufl.org/en/publications/vote-mail-ballots-cast-florida

I get a little discouraged reading things like this because I realize any system can ultimately be defeated.