Republicans in Wisconsin gave the state’s citizens a choice: stay home and be safe, or risk infection by voting in person. Many polling places were closed for lack of staff; voters who had requested absentee ballots didn’t get them in time, and the Roberts Supreme Court in a party line vote refused to extend the deadline for getting ballots in by mail.
(Some reports from the field via the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.)
The Republican Party from Trump on down has made it clear that they do NOT want voting by mail to be easy. (Or any kind of voting for that matter.) They are counting on low voter turn out to suppress the Democratic vote. Democrats are pushing for including funding for absentee and vote by mail efforts in additional pandemic relief bills.
“The integrity of the election system is central to our democracy, [and] how anyone could oppose our enabling the states to have vote by mail raises so many other questions,” Pelosi said. “But let's just be hopeful and have public opinion weigh in on that."
Pelosi’s comments were made the day after Trump rejected the idea of putting requirements on states for how to run elections during the coronavirus pandemic.
"The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to, you would never have a Republican elected in this country again," Trump said during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.” "They had things in there about election days and what you do and all sorts of drawbacks. They had things that were just totally crazy."
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When voters turn out, Republicans lose — and they know it. It’s why they have been making it harder to vote with a variety of measures. They are effectively killing democracy. But that’s not the only murder they’re working on.
There’s one critical problem with absentee ballots and voting by mail: what happens if there’s no mail service? From a diary I posted April 3:
While we are trying to survive the Trump pandemic, there may be a major casualty: the United States Postal Service. Via Fortune:
...It delivers about 1 million lifesaving medications each year and serves as the only delivery link to Americans living in rural areas. Working with other delivery services like UPS, the agency supports $1.7 trillion in sales and 7.3 million private sector workers year, and this year will prove essential to delivering the 2020 Census to citizens as well as any vote-by-mail initiatives. The USPS is the federal government’s most favorably viewed agency, with an approval rating of 90%.
Yet once again, the USPS is in crisis mode.
With a negative net worth of $65 billion and an additional $140 billion in unfunded liabilities, the USPS originally expected to run out of liquidity by 2021 without intervention. That has accelerated rapidly because of COVID-19. Fewer people and businesses are sending mail because of the outbreak, which could hasten the decline of the Postal Service and close its doors as early as June, officials warned.
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There’s more details at the original post.
Wisconsin has shown us there are no depths to which the GOP will not sink to discourage voting up to and including making people risk their lives. If the Trump pandemic is still raging by November or in danger of recurring, we could be seeing the need for more social distancing and other measures. Voting by mail, absentee ballots, could become a matter of public health. We can expect Republicans to fight to our deaths to keep that from happening; they won’t even secure our current voting systems against interference.
So, if they can kill off the Post Office — a long-standing conservative dream — they can also effectively block voting by mail, which could be a death blow for any hope of restoring democracy in our country. So much for their respect for the work of the Founders; the remark attributed to Ben Franklin is still very much the question.
Keep an eye on what happens with voting in the next few months. If we are going to do vote by mail across the country come November, it will take a massive effort ASAP. But keep an eye on what happens to the Post Office too…