Wisconsin's Warning for the November Election
How are people expected to vote if theyre not supposed to even leave their homes?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/wisconsin-election-coronavirus/609496/
Im accused of trying to conduct a voter purge in the state of Wisconsin, Rick Esenberg told me by way of introduction. Esenberg runs the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which is suing to force the states election commission to remove hundreds of thousands of inactive voters from the rolls.
I had called Esenberg to ask about the in-person election that Wisconsin was planning to hold tomorrow even as its citizens are under a statewide directive to stay at home amid the coronavirus outbreak. Democrats, including Governor Tony Evers, want to conduct the election by mail so that Wisconsinites dont have to risk their health to go to the polls. The Republican-controlled state legislature is rejecting that ideaeven
though some
studies suggest that voting by mail helps Republican candidates more than Democratic ones.
Why would Republicans oppose a measure that could make it easierand saferfor people to vote? Theyve cited the logistical and legal hurdles of mailing every Wisconsin voter a ballot in such a short period.
But at the heart of the dispute is a disagreement over the fundamental goal of the proposalmaximizing the number of people who can exercise their right to vote. Im not one of these people who says thats necessarily an unalloyed good, Esenberg told me. To some extent, I do believe that if people are not willing to make some effort to vote, maybe that indicates that theyre not that interested and theyre not going to inform themselves, and its just as well that they dont vote.
To conservatives like Esenberg, prioritizing turnout as a benchmark is a mistake. Should we evaluate the fairness of our voting laws simply by how many people vote, and thats sort of the sign of a functioning democracy? he said. I dont know that thats true. Everybody votes in Cuba, but nobody thinks thats a well-functioning democracy. I dont worry as much about how many people vote. I think theres a lot of people who arent particularly interested in voting.
snip
they would once again try a poll tax (and this time it would be far more expansive in terms of states involved) if they thought they could get away with it