Wisconsin was scheduled to have an election tomorrow. It still might. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen.
Ian Millhiser at Vox lays out the story:
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers has effectively rescheduled the election the state was planning to hold on Tuesday, handing down an order suspending in-person voting until June 9 “unless the Legislature passes and the Governor approves a different date for in-person voting” and allowing voters to request absentee ballots until five days before the new election date.
Yet it is unclear that the order will stand. Republicans have fought tooth-and-nail against nearly any effort to delay the election or to make it easier for voters to cast mail-in ballots, and the state Supreme Court is dominated by Republicans.
Last week, Evers called the state legislature into session and asked it to delay the election. But the Republican-controlled legislature ended that session a few seconds after it was convened. So Evers’ executive order is a test of whether he has the legal authority to delay the election without approval from the state legislature.
Wisconsin now joins nearly a dozen states which have elected to postpone spring elections as most Americans remain at home to avoid spreading coronavirus. But in Wisconsin, the GOP has consistently fought efforts to ensure that the state would have an election where every eligible resident of Wisconsin could cast a ballot.
Republicans rejected Evers’s proposal to automatically mail ballots to every voter in the state, and they’ve fought hard in federal court — including in the US Supreme Court — to prevent ballots from being counted after the original April 7 election date.
Realistically, state election officials may not know until the very last minute whether this election is happening tomorrow or not. It is likely that the Republican Party will race to court in order to block Evers’ order, but it will likely take at least a few hours for the state courts to resolve that issue. Meanwhile, a case is still pending in the US Supreme Court asking whether the deadline for submitting absentee ballots is April 7 or April 13 — assuming that Evers’s order does not stand.
He writes, “Buckle up. This is going to be a wild ride.”
Trump spoke about this briefly at his Coronavirus Rally and said the quiet part out loud as usual: the real issue underlying this dispute is the fact that the Republicans want to ensure the re-election of a right-wing State Supreme Court Judge and they believe they will benefit from this extremely low turnout election. Millhiser explains:
Next to the presidential primary, where polls show that former Vice President Joe Biden is likely to trounce his remaining primary opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the most important race on the ballot Tuesday is a state Supreme Court race between incumbent Justice Daniel Kelly and challenger Judge Jill Karofsky.
Though Wisconsin Supreme Court races are nominally nonpartisan, Kelly is a staunch conservative appointed to the court by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Karofsky is broadly supported by liberal groups and is widely viewed as the Democratic alternative to Kelly.
Moreover, as law professor and election law expert Rick Hasen recently noted, “only 38% of voters who had requested an absentee ballot in heavily Democratic Milwaukee County had returned one, compared with over 56% of absentee voters in nearby Republican-leaning Waukesha County.”
There is at least some data, in other words, suggesting that, if voters were neither able to safely cast in-person ballots nor mail in absentee ballots if they received them late, that Kelly would be favored over Karofsky in the state Supreme Court race. By fighting to keep voters from casting a ballot, in other words, Republicans could potentially maintain their supermajority on the state Supreme Court.
And now that very court is likely to decide whether this election can be postponed.
Here’s what Trump had to say:
Q Okay, I’ll go with my second one. The governor of Wisconsin is now talking about delaying the primary, at least not having in-person voting. So my question is — and I asked this a couple weeks ago; I want to see if you’ve made any progress on this. Looking ahead to the fall, are you taking steps to ensure that the general election will happen even if this pandemic has reemerged or hasn’t gone away? And —
THE PRESIDENT: The general election will happen on November 3rd.
Q And do you — are you —
THE PRESIDENT: In Wisconsin, what happened is I, through social media — media put out a very strong endorsement of a Republican conservative judge who’s an excellent, brilliant judge. He’s a justice. And I hear what happened is his poll numbers went through the roof. And because of that, I think they delayed the election.
Q You don’t think the governor is concerned about people going to in-person voting?
THE PRESIDENT: I don’t know. Why didn’t he do it before? He was doing right before the election.
Q But do you think every —
THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me. Why didn’t he do this two weeks ago? All of a sudden —
Q But isn’t it — because of the pandemic.
THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me. All of a sudden, an election which is taking place very soon gets delayed. Now, I just endorsed him today and it was a very strong endorsement. His polls — he’s gone very high up. And all of a sudden, the governor comes out — the Democrat governor, by the way — comes out and says, “Oh, we’re going to move this election.” So, I don’t know. I’m sure — I hope you’re right. I hope you’re right.
Q But — but do you think every state in this country should be prepared for mail-in voting in case we’re in a situation —
THE PRESIDENT: No, because I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting. I think people should vote with ID — voter ID. I think voter ID is very important. And the reason they don’t want voter ID is because they intend to cheat.
When you get something, when you buy something, you look at your cards and credit cards and different cards — you have your picture on many of them. Not all of them, but on many of them. You should have a picture on your — on your — for voting. It should be called “Voter ID.” They should have that. And it shouldn’t be mail-in —
Q But how are you going to —
THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me. It shouldn’t be mail-in voting. It should be: You go to a booth and you proudly display yourself. You don’t send it in the mail where people pick up — all sorts of bad things can happen by the time they signed that, if they sign that — if they signed that by the time it gets in and is tabulated.
No, it shouldn’t be mailed in. You should vote at the booth. And you should have voter ID, because when you have voter ID, that’s the real deal.
So, I think you can see why this made me wonder if we’re seeing a preview. He does.
I have no idea where we’ll be in November. But even in the best of times they cheat. If we are still in turmoil I think it’s obvious they will do everything they can to take advantage of it. It has me worried.