WisconsinEye
Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, left, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos practice social distancing at a March 25 press conference.
It was hard for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald to set a new low for a sense of fair play, personal decency or just common humanity. But they’ve found a way to do it.
When Gov. Tony Evers finally got around to calling a special legislative session to delay in-person voting for the April 7 election, Vos and Fitzgerald had the session gaveled in and out without so much as giving the proposal the courtesy of a vote, much less a fair debate.
Then on April 6, when Evers reversed himself at the eleventh hour and decided that maybe he did have the authority to delay the election on his own after all, Vos and Fitzgerald predictably rushed to the state Supreme Court to get his action reversed. The conservative majority obliged in a matter of hours.
Evers bears some responsibility for all this. If there was a strategy behind his actions it’s lost on me, but that’s for another day. The governor did do the right thing in the end and Vos and Fitzgerald responded by doing the wrong thing all along.
It’s all so clear. These guys want to make sure that ultra-conservative state Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly wins a full 10-year term on the court. To accomplish that they want to suppress voter numbers on the theory that a big turnout would favor his challenger, the liberal-backed Dane County Judge Jill Karofsky.
And they might end up being right. According to Wisconsin Public Radio, the city of Milwaukee, which usually has 180 polling places, could staff only five. Reports late in the day showed that wait times were up to two hours there. Dane County voters did well with absentee ballots (that’s how I voted) but if this ends up even suppressing, say, several thousand votes in Milwaukee, that could end up being enough to tip the election to Kelly.
We won’t know for another week. That’s because a federal judge ordered that final results not be announced until all of the absentee ballots are counted. But that’s also a problem. That same judge ruled that, since so many voters had not received their ballots in time to meet the Tuesday deadline for sending them back, they should get another week to get them in.
Republicans rushed to the United States Supreme Court and got that part of his ruling overturned. So if you didn’t get an absentee ballot by Tuesday and didn’t want to risk your health or threaten the health of others by voting in person, well, you don’t count.
So, let’s not mince words here. Vos and Fitzgerald literally have placed the very lives of thousands of Wisconsinites in jeopardy just so they can suppress voter turnout to increase the chances of electing a radical right-winger to a full term on the state high court.
It’s entirely possible that someone will die because of it. I didn’t think these guys could get any lower. They found a way.
