Tag: Wisconsin primary election

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

New York Times logoAs Wisconsin scrambled to expand voting by mail for its election on Tuesday, many absentee voters said their ballots went undelivered.

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. Continue reading.

Wisconsin’s election is a blatant attack on democracy

The Republican Party’s naked thirst for power is rarely exposed as viscerally as it has been in Wisconsin over the past few months. After a last-minute bout of legal wrangling, Wisconsin is moving forward with in-person elections Tuesday in a bald attempt to use the coronavirus crisis as a mechanism for voter suppression. The party could emerge with blood on its hands, and all for the chance to win a state Supreme Court seat.

Over the past months, as coronavirus has ravaged the country, most states chose to postpone their primary elections rather than require their citizens to endanger themselves by voting in person. Not Wisconsin, though, where the Republican-controlled legislature apparently sensed an opportunity. Beyond just the Democratic primary, the state’s April 7 elections include a vote for a crucial seat on the state Supreme Court, where the conservative judge Daniel Kelly is facing re-election. Republicans foresaw that holding the election during plague conditions — when people are encouraged to stay in their homes and away from others — would suppress voter turnout in major cities, giving their party a huge advantage.

At first, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers agreed with his colleagues across the aisle, believing that the election should continue as planned. But as time wore on, and the scale of the crisis became more evident, Evers’s fellow Democrats in the statehouse became increasingly frantic as they urged him to reconsider. Evers’s “refusal to push for a delay of his state’s Tuesday primary has infuriated fellow Democrats in the state, who are now openly accusing him of failing to prevent an impending train wreck,” Politico reported last week. Continue reading.