Chairman 's new century club issued the following announcement on April 7.
Wisconsin Primary Recap: Voters Forced to Choose Between Their Health and Their Civic Duty
Wisconsin held its presidential primary between former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders. Mr. Biden had a strong lead in a recent, widely respected poll.
Polls closed at 9 p.m. Eastern time. Long lines were seen in cities like Milwaukee, which had only five polling places open.
The state’s elections commission had ordered municipal clerks not to release any results until April 13, in compliance with a federal court ruling.
Wisconsin Democrats wanted to extend absentee voting and even postpone the election altogether, but Republicans successfully blocked both in court. As a result, Democratic turnout was likely to be depressed because of the virus and the deadlines for absentee voting. A crucial seat on the State Supreme Court is on the ballot.
An election almost certain to be tarred as illegitimate.
In Milwaukee, citizens were forced to choose between following public health orders to stay home and stand in line for hours at one of just five polling places the city kept open amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Across the state along the St. Croix River, a state senator who is her county’s chief medical examiner brought a homemade face mask to the polls because she didn’t want to take a surgical mask from her co-workers who will have to inspect the bodies of people who die from the coronavirus.
And everywhere in between, Wisconsinites reported an array of problems with absentee ballots. Some didn’t arrive, some couldn’t be legally witnessed and others were afraid to venture outside their homes to return their ballots by Tuesday night’s deadline.
It added up to an election almost certain to be tarred as illegitimate and contested by whichever side loses — especially if the conservative State Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly wins a full 10-year term.
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“People are going to be wondering about the authenticity of the vote no matter what because of the politicalization,” said Patty Schachtner, a Democratic state senator from St. Croix County who made her own mask to wear during a six-hour stint as a poll worker. Other poll workers, she said, had no protection at all.
That Wisconsin’s leaders, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and the Republicans in charge of state legislative majorities, Robin Vos, the Assembly speaker, and Scott Fitzgerald, the State Senate majority leader, could not come to an agreement on how to alter the election is an epic and predictable failure.
It follows a decade of bitter partisan wrangling that saw former Gov. Scott Walker and his G.O.P. clinically attack and defang the state’s Democratic institutions, starting with organized labor and continuing with voting laws making it far harder for poor and black residents of urban areas to vote.
Like so much else in Wisconsin, Tuesday’s vote brought divisions along partisan and geographical lines. In Milwaukee, where just five of 180 polling sites remained open, voters who hadn’t already cast absentee ballots — an overwhelmingly black and Hispanic population — waited in lines for hours.
Elsewhere in the state, especially in areas that have not yet been hit hard by the outbreak, officials reported shorter lines and polling sites that remained open for business as usual.
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“We have people, out of the kindness of their heart, have volunteered to drive around and witness ballots and deliver them to the clerk’s office,” said Matt Lederer, the Democratic Party chairman in Outagamie County, in the Fox Valley between Milwaukee and Green Bay. “We’re making phone calls and we're doing our best but so far, I’m hearing that the turnout seems low.”
Republicans, meanwhile, said they knew of few problems outside of Milwaukee, which has long been portrayed by the state’s conservatives as the source of Wisconsin’s problems. There was little sympathy.
“Everybody had a fair opportunity to vote,” said Dennis Gasper, the Republican Party chairman in Sheboygan County. “Nobody’s having a problem voting. I went by a number of our polling places and there’s no lines out in the country.”
Original source here.
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