Fish-Fry Time is Voter-Purge Time

Good Morning from Lake Wissota…

While you were preparing to enjoy your Friday night fish fry, a Republican-appointed judge in the Milwaukee suburbs may have just fixed the 2020 election for the Republican Party and put an unnecessary barrier between the ballot box and almost a quarter-million Wisconsin voters, maybe even you.

It is vital to note that there is not and has never been a track record for widespread voter fraud in Wisconsin. The people who scream loudest about preventing voter fraud are the same people who believe Donald Trump’s “favor” was about preventing corruption in Ukraine. In both cases, their claims are based on political cheating more than any contrived sense of compassion.

The conservative group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is one of the many tentacles funded by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, one of America’s largest right-wing foundations. Last month, WILL filed a complaint that the Wisconsin Elections Commission hadn’t moved fast enough to strip 234,000 voters from the rolls based on data from outside sources that indicate they may have moved.

Why hadn’t the Elections Commissioned stripped away those voting rights? Because in thousands of cases, the voters had NOT moved. The outside data was in error. The Elections Commission rejected the WILL complaint.

But WILL was able to find a judge, appointed by Scott Walker, to take up the case and quickly rule through a strict constructionist lens that the language in one state statute didn’t allow the commission to do more to guard against errors. If the rules say to purge the voters without proper safeguards, well, rules are rules, he… ruled. “I don’t want to see someone deactivated, but I don’t write the law,” said Judge Paul Malloy as quoted in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (and in some future screenplay about the Pontius Pilates of American democracy).

As a result, around 234,000 Wisconsin voters who were legally registered will be purged and made ineligible to vote effortlessly, a right they had no reason to expect would be taken away. And that might include you. So when you show up at the polls in 2020, you might be surprised to learn a conservative group bounced your right to vote at that moment. Sure, maybe you’ll go through the extra hoops to re-register or fill out a provisional ballot that can be counted a later. But maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll be so shocked or cynical or dejected that you won’t bother. Screw that, you’ll say, and walk away.

That is exactly what conservatives who attack voting rights want to happen. Fewer voters is good for them. These are the same politicians who, you’ll recall, thwarted the will of the voters by rigging district maps, attacking early voting, and taking away a governor’s powers before he can be sworn in. The real fraud is when people drunk with power attack the fundamentals of democracy itself.

This isn’t new. After all, what they’re trying in Wisconsin worked in Georgia last year when the Republican candidate for governor, who just happened to be Georgia’s Secretary of State, organized the purging of 670,000 voters from the rolls in the year before the election. Were all of the purges in error? No, but just over 50,000 voters who went through the trouble of re-registering still hadn’t been processed in time, and the Republican “won” the governor’s race… by just over 50,000 votes.

This right-wing group was able to launch an attack on seven percent of all Wisconsin voters because the Elections Commission was trying to do the right thing by double-checking whether people had moved or not. Their attempt at true public service was undermined and weaponized. This is not a matter simply for a few college students who move away. It’s also a matter for young families who might not become lifelong voters because of the hassle. It’s also a matter for entrepreneurs who may have registered a vehicle at a business address. It’s also a matter for older voters who simply didn’t return a postcard that never made clear their voting rights were at risk.

It’s a matter of letting all eligible citizens vote, vote conveniently, and then going after the extremely rare cases of fraud. Instead, this conservative tactic of “shoot first, restore voting rights later” is going to threaten the already tenuous integrity of Wisconsin elections. There is time to check your voter status. There is time for helpful neighbors to search for and re-register affected voters. But there is also a need to make clear to anyone --conservative, liberal, moderate or agnostic-- that these unnecessary hurdles targeting you --yes, you-- are part of a tactic right out of the voter suppression playbook, with strategies best left in places like old Ukraine.

Pat Kreitlow is Wisconsin Managing Editor of a soon-to-be announced digital political news site for Courier Newsroom.