By Ray Mueller
After political, judicial, and administrative machinations, the only heroes in Wisconsin’s bizarre and tainted election on April 7 were Milwaukee and Green Bay residents who waited 2 to 4 hours to vote, besieged local election clerks, election poll workers, and the National Guard people who were prepared to help. Unfortunately, local officials in Green Bay and Milwaukee refused qualified National Guard help.
With the college student voted dispersed and diminished, Republicans saw another opportunity for voter suppression. At their behest, the US Supreme Court butted in to knock down district judge William Conley’s very reasonable ruling on accepting mail-in ballots.
In Wisconsin, whatever Gov. Tony Evers proposes, Republicans oppose. After being indecisive until April 6, maybe Evers should have ordered an April 7 election if he really wanted to postpone it. Two days earlier, Republicans held a 30-second mock legislative session on Evers’ request to have the legislature set a date.
Republican Party of Wisconsin face Robin Vos obtained medical surgical gown and mask, proclaiming it was very safe to vote. His appalling, insensitive, inconsciable appearance rightly drew many outraged Facebook posts.
Beyond perpetuating their permanent opposition to Evers, the state’s Republicans obviously saw the election chaos as a way to boost the chances of keeping Daniel Kelly on the state’s supreme court, where he protects Republican interests.
On April 8, another curveball was thrown. Three bins of undelivered absentee ballots requested by voters in Oshkosh and Appleton rested at the Milwaukee postal center. From large cities to villages, many more postal breakdowns surfaced, including illegible postmarks or none at all, putting the counting of thousands of otherwise legal ballots in doubt. This could have decided some local office races but did not do so in Calumet County.
Why the postal service insists on sending single source mail batches (city clerk offices in Oshkosh and Appleton in this case), addressed to recipients right in that city, to Milwaukee and back is puzzling at best and unacceptable in this instance.
After completing our Calumet County board of election canvass, based on incident reports from the polling places, I estimate that 5 to 10 percent of the mail-in ballots in some voting districts were rejected because of no witness signature (husband and wife in some cases), no address, or other technical reason based on the state’s voting laws.
I recognized some of the names. These people did NOT follow the INSTRUCTIONS they received. Some incident reports named the people whose ballots were rejected while others just logged the reason for the rejection – two to three pages (totals of 35 to 50 in some cases). (More on this topic in a later blog.)
Wisconsin Republicans claimed April 7 needed to be election day in order to have an orderly transaction for any changes (often not a great number) in county board, school district, city, town, and village offices. True enough but, in an example of blatant hypocrisy, Republicans conveniently forget that they argued it was appropriate to have a Supreme Court vacancy during nearly the last full year of the Obama administration.
The National Republican chair, in another example of GOP obsession with voter fraud, was on national TV saying it was necessary to keep people (presumably Democrats) from going door to door to collect ballots.
That’s extremely demeaning to poll workers and election clerks who strive to maintain current eligible voter lists, account for each ballot issued to eligible voters, don’t process a 2nd ballot for someone who voted by mail and then comes in to vote in person, and don’t willy-nilly take in bags of ballots collected by someone.
Yet Republican operatives in a North Carolina Congressional district did that two years ago when an agent working for their candidate went house to house to collect and possibly fill in or alter absentee ballots and then deliver them for counting. A new election was held and the bad guys (with another candidate) still won.