Nothing about the Wisconsin election was normal
Wisconsin proves it: Republicans will sacrifice voters' health to keep power
The deliberate chaos and unthinkable images from the state’s primary marked Republicans’ dress rehearsal for November
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/10/wisconsin-primary-coronavirus-republican-voting-by-mail
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Nothing about the Wisconsin election was normal. Not voters in homemade masks, not the immunocompromised woman whose requested absentee ballot never arrived voting in full bubble wrap, not the plaintive signs that read “this is ridiculous”. But the five conservative Republican appointees to the US supreme court, concerned, ruefully and almost comically, that something might “fundamentally alter the nature of the election”, stepped in … on the side of forcing tens of thousands of Wisconsinites to brave the pandemic and vote in person.
Along a dreary 5-4 party line vote, the supreme court’s conservative majority, most appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, overturned two lower-court rulings that had extended the vote-by-mail deadline until next week, despite evidence that tens of thousands of absentee ballots had yet to be delivered to voters who requested them, and that untold thousands more might not be postmarked in time. Ruling comfortably from their own living rooms, the five conservatives required these voters to leave their homes during a shelter-in-place order and placed them in the path of a virus. (On Wednesday, the day after the election, reports came of absentee ballots piled in post offices, undelivered.)
That the supreme court intervened not on the side of voters and fair elections, but in order to protect particular Republican partisan interests, should be saddening, yet unsurprising. Chief Justice John Roberts arrived in Washington almost 30 years ago as a young justice department appointee with a particular interest: eroding the protections of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Under his leadership, this court has embraced his cramped vision with gusto.
The Roberts court has made clear that it should not be looked to as any guarantor of the foundational right to vote. Not in an emergency. Not at all. In 2013’s Shelby County v Holder, a 5-4 court defanged the enforcement provisions of section V of the VRA and laid the groundwork for a decade of voter ID requirements, precinct closures and voter roll purges from states with documented histories of racist voting inequities.
The legislatures behind those efforts, a 5-4 court decreed in 2018’s Abbott v Texas, must be awarded the “presumption of good faith” – even for naked racial gerrymandering schemes. Those voter roll purges were upheld in 2018’s Husted v A Philip Randolph Institute, where the court, again 5-4, created a non-existent loophole that justified canceling registrations if a voter had not casted a ballot in two consecutive elections. Then last year, Roberts authored a, yes, 5-4 decision – Common Cause v Rucho – which slammed the federal courthouses closed to partisan gerrymandering claims at precisely the time a growing number of decisions, by judges appointed by presidents of both parties, saw both an urgent role for the courts and a clear standard for when politicized mapmaking crossed a constitutional boundary.
Gerrymandering and voter purges were at the heart of the GOP urgency to hold this election, this week, with this diminished turnout. A critical state supreme court seat was on the ballot. The winner could sway an upcoming appeal over whether Wisconsin can purge about 240,000 voters from its rolls ahead of November – keep in mind, Trump only won this state by 22,000 votes in 2016 – and could also determine whether Republicans, once again, have a free hand to gerrymander the state’s legislative and congressional maps in 2021. The maps the party carefully engineered in 2011, behind closed doors at a Madison law firm, delivered a 63-36 Republican edge among state assembly districts in 2018, even though Democrats won nearly 54% of the statewide vote, and a statewide edge of about 200,000 votes.
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