The Wisconsin primary elections are on Tuesday, April 7. Wisconsin is one of the only states that has continued with its plans to hold elections during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. At least 15 other states have, very reasonably, postponed their primaries to later dates due to fears of endangering public health. Also, postponing the election dates, many states have increased their number of absentee and vote-in ballots in order to curb the number of people leaving their homes and congregating in public spaces.
Wisconsin is not following any of these measures — despite facing strong pushback from many Democrats in leadership.
Monday, April 6th was a day of decisions, overrulings and disappointment. The day began with many Wisconsinites facing a near impossible dilemma: risk their lives and those of their families to vote or stay home and not have a say in democratic elections. In the middle of the day, some hope was gained when the state’s governor Tony Evers evoked his emergency powers through an executive order to postpone the primary election date. The debilitating knockout, however, came in the evening when the Wisconsin Supreme Court voted in a 4–2 ruling along ideological lines that Governor Evers could not use emergency powers to change.
Any and all arguments in favor of continuing the primaries in this manner are asinine; every vote is invaluable, and every vote suppressed is another shot at the U.S.’s crumbling democracy. Primaries are important as they showcase crucial information about state representation in the upcoming general election.
However, voter suppression is not new to Wisconsin. In 2019, according to a CNN report, a judge in a completely malicious interpretation of state law, took around 234,000 voters off the rolls. The state has also suffered instances of gerrymandering — a Wisconsin case went all the way to the Supreme Court. But putting people’s lives in danger in order to win a state’s election and to cheat a way into the presidency is unprecedented, and criminal.
In Washington, Republicans opposed mandated vote by mail in the emergency spending bill. Trump backed their decision, stating on the morning show “Fox and Friends” that “if you ever agreed to [a mandated vote by mail policy] you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again, they had things in there about election days, and what you do… and it was totally crazy.” It is difficult to look past the reprehensible implications that the President’s statement has on the true nature of the voting population in the U.S., but there are also two painfully ironic things about his claim. First, since the older voting population is largely the one at risk as well as the most likely to skew Republican, Trump and the Republican party are sabotaging their own votes and their voters’ lives, which just seems criminally negligent. Second, Trump himself requested an absentee ballot in the state of Florida for the Republican primary, taking advantage of the policy that he himself is against implementing federally.
Every eligible voter, whether they are conservative or liberal, must be able to vote in their state’s primaries in a safe way that will not put their health on the line. This should not be a hot take.
