Wisconsin Disenfranchisement Shows Need For Democrats to Act
Wisconsin’s April election fiasco demonstrates the urgent need for action with the clock ticking for taking action to protect safe access to voting for millions of Americans this November.
As the state struggled to process the avalanche of over 1.2 million absentee ballot requests, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that ballots must be postmarked by Election Day to count — meaning that if you hadn’t received your ballot, you were forced to vote in-person. Nearly 10,000 voters who were never sent a ballot, while another nearly 100,000 were sent ballots on Friday, when it’s very likely ballots did not arrive in time for voters to postmark and send back by Election Day — and these represent lower bounds of estimates of those disenfranchised. The Court’s conservative majority characterized the decision as answering a “narrow, technical question,” and as in Bush v. Gore, a partisan conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court effectively decided an election.
Wisconsin makes the lesson for November clear: that courts in both the states and the U.S. Supreme Court are willing to intervene to advance the interests of the GOP. Just this morning President Trump gave the game away by saying that voting by mail “doesn’t work out well for Republicans,” putting partisan interests above the health of voters.
Looking ahead, we should assume the worst from Donald Trump and Republicans, and we also should expect much more from Democrats. Accountability from voters is sorely in this moment of crisis and defenders of democracy must act vigilantly now to protect the election.
Democrats Must Act (Not Dither) NOW
Republicans in Washington and Madison are clearly to blame for blocking efforts to safely conduct voting this year, but the lesson for Democrats is that they cannot wait to take action. Governor Tony Evers waited far too long to act to stop in-person voting amid his stay-at-home order, which only made this problem worse. If this fight had played out two weeks earlier, that would have allowed reopening of polling sites so we could make in-person voting safer (Milwaukee had only five of 180 polling locations open for 600,000 residents; Waukesha County had only one polling location open for its 72,000 people).
Democrats simply cannot dither on this issue — they must take bold, decisive action and they have to take it now.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Leader Chuck Schumer, and congressional Democrats must make election protection measures “must-haves” in the next legislation addressing the impacts of coronavirus. As Wisconsin made clear after struggling to process their surge of absentee ballots, state and local governments will need significant federal funding and planning over the next seven months to protect the election at a time of growing fiscal challenge.
The recent $2.2 trillion legislation to address COVID-19 included only a small portion of the funding experts say will be needed to protect the election. What we need is the federal government to fully fund state and local election administration needs, including (as congressional Democrats proposed) “no-excuse” absentee voting by mail or dropped off ballot as an option for the November election, in addition to preserving in-person voting options.
Vote By Mail Is Both Essential and Insufficient
The public debate on election protection is bogged down in a partisan squabble. “Universal vote by mail would be the end of our republic as we know it,” tweeted ultra right-wing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), apparently unaware that all 50 states have some form of voting by mail and five states now vote completely by mail. And President Trump last week oddly said voting “should be you go to a booth [and] proudly display yourself,” while requesting an absentee Florida mail ballot for himself.
In fact, the “mail voting only” debate doesn’t match the reality of what is being proposed nor would such a policy be the best way to ensure all voters in every state can cast their vote in just under seven months. Many states will need to dramatically expand options for voting by mail, but are unprepared for the challenges that come from mail balloting as Wisconsin was.
The massive backlog in Wisconsin demonstrates how increased mail voting will also require added investment in people and technology to process and count ballots. Additionally, voting solely by mail and sending every voter a ballot requires robust and well-established processes to ensure that voting rolls are continuously updated, through means like automatic voter registration, and for signature matching. It may be impossible for states to implement these processes in just a few months.
While voting by mail is a great option for many voters, states must also be prepared for voters to continue to participate in-person. Voters with accessibility needs, voters with no fixed address, voters with varied language needs, and those who have recently moved often cannot vote by mail. Additionally, mail ballots are far more likely to be disqualified than those cast in-person. Overall, these challenges with voting by mail disproportionately impact members of historically marginalized communities.
Therefore, while making mail voting an option for all Americans makes very good sense amidst a health crisis, we must also maintain and expand in-person voting options. Priorities for safe in-person voting include increasing early voting by spreading out the number of days over which voters cast ballots, and increasing the number of polling places and vote centers to reduce lines. In fact, no voter should ever have to wait in a line and ensuring widespread access to vote by mail can help end lines at the polls once and for all.
We Can Do This — It’s Only a Question If We Will
Acting quickly to expand voting options and resource states to implement changes should not be a partisan issue — and it often has not been in the states. After extremely long lines on Election Day discouraged thousands from voting in 2012, Florida’s Republican legislature took action to dramatically expand mail and early voting options. Today, many states are taking action to protect voters for primary elections but need to go further for November. In Michigan, building on a major 2018 referendum allowing no-excuse absentee voting in the state, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is mailing prepaid absentee ballot requests to all registered voters in advance of the May 5th municipal elections.
Make no mistake, the election will be held on November 3. That date is dictated by federal law, but it falls to state and local officials to administer the election. In the current crisis, that amounts to an unfunded mandate at a time state and local governments can least afford. Congress has a responsibility to act to protect the election by giving states the resources they need to run it.
Protecting the November election should not be a partisan issue, but Washington Republicans seem intent on making it one. Therefore, Democrats must make election protection a “must have” in the next phase of coronavirus response legislation.
