Nationwide, the 50 states have 7,383 state lawmakers. Wisconsin has 132; 33 state senators and 99 members of the Assembly. Although receiving far less attention than U.S. senators and members of congress, state legislators who make laws are tremendously important.
As important as state legislators are, they seldom make the national news. Only when a local or state issue commands national attention, does an occasional state senator or representative get so much as a few seconds on the national media. Yet it is the dream of every state legislator to get this coveted national exposure.
Wisconsin’s Speaker of the Assembly, Robin Vos, achieved that dream. During Wisconsin’s April 7 election, described by critics as the most disgraceful American election in recent history, Speaker Vos was highlighted. Serving as an “election inspector,” he was photographed wearing personal protective equipment, the mask, gloves and surgical gown. Adorned in these protective duds, he is cheerfully advising a national audience that “You are incredibly safe out there.”
This incongruous scenario had to bring howling laughter, if not scorn, by viewers of the national and social media. But hey, Mr. Speaker, you made the bigtime media.
How did this candidate for national “buffoon of the month” become one of the three most powerful politicians in Wisconsin?
That’s easy; it’s a direct result of a sordid history of gerrymandering and voter suppression.
Prior to the 2010 decennial redistricting process, while national Democratic leadership and Democratic politicians were asleep at the switch, Republican leadership successfully targeted state legislatures that could be turned from Democratic to Republican. With Republican-dominated legislatures, aided by Republican governors, boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts were drawn to favor Republicans. With computer technology that process is easy to accomplish by packing Democrats into a few districts while spreading Republican majorities over a large number of districts.
Wisconsin’s 2010 reapportionment is one of the nation’s most blatant examples of extreme gerrymandering. Statewide, we have a roughly equal proportion of Republicans and Democrats. Nevertheless, during recent elections, even with more statewide Democratic votes than Republican votes for Assembly candidates, we ended up with a two-thirds Republican majority in the Assembly. That approximate proportion remains.
With Republican control of both the State Senate and Assembly, and the right-wing Scott Walker as governor, it didn’t stop with gerrymandering. They promptly enacted legislation clearly designed to discourage Democratic voters, and favor Republicans.
A tried and true method by which to accomplish this is to enact strict voter ID laws, requiring registered voters to show a “valid” ID at the voting booth, or to upload an ID when requesting an absentee ballot online. The stated reason for this is to “prevent fraud.”
To many citizens, this sounds innocent enough. How hard is it to present an ID for the privilege to vote? No problem, right?
In fact, it is a problem for students whose student ID, complete with photo, is not considered a “valid” ID for voting. And it is a problem for, especially, older folks who have no driver’s license.
There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that voter fraud involving non-registered voters, or those with fraudulent identity, has existed. People don’t risk prison sentences to cast an extra vote. When behind closed doors, Republican legislators cheered when informed of the likely results of such legislation, it gives the lie to the fiction that it’s all about “preventing fraud.” However innocent it may sound to citizens, the result of voter ID laws, a reduced Democratic vote, is not an unintentional consequence of “preventing fraud.” The specific intent of Republican politicians is to rig the vote.
Another method of suppressing the vote is to target districts in Milwaukee and Madison to purge rolls of voters who missed recent elections, under the guise that they have moved out of the district. Other methods include inconvenient location, or inadequate numbers, of polling places, forcing voters to stand in long lines, sometimes in inclement weather. This brings us to the present.
Many states, including Ohio with a Republican governor, legitimately postponed their elections because of COVID-19. But Wisconsin’s Republicans were having none of that as they had a Walker-appointed, Trump-endorsed, State Supreme Court incumbent up for reelection — forget the fiction that this court is “non-partisan.” Governor Evers called a special session of the legislature to consider postponing the election. The legislature responded with a fifteen second “special session,” doing nothing.
In desperation, Governor Evers tried to postpone the election by executive order. Speaker Vos and the Senate majority leader challenged this order. Predictably, the Republican-dominated State Supreme Court affirmed that this was not in the governor’s power.
Voters, taking the stay-at-home deal seriously, then overwhelmed the system with 1.2 million requests for absentee ballots. Many of these ballots were not received on time, and some not even delivered. To accommodate for this problem, a lower state court extended absentee voting until April 13.
Again, having none of this, Wisconsin Republicans appealed this lower court decision to the US Supreme Court. It promptly overturned the lower court decision to extend the deadline. It’s amazing how the U.S. Supreme Court can move with blazing speed when it comes to assisting voter suppression that benefits Republicans.
The remaining choice for many voters: don’t vote, or risk exposure to the virus. Voting in person was compounded with only five polling stations open in Milwaukee, in contrast to its usual 180.
Hence, the spectacle of masked voters, properly spaced, standing in ln long lines for hours to cast their ballots, with Speaker Vos in the national spotlight — and an assured Republican victory.
But wait — maybe it was voter resentment of Republican malfeasance. In a stunning, shocking upset, the Democratically-backed candidate handily defeated the Trump-endorsed Republican.
This Herculean court-supported Republican effort at rigging the election should serve as a warning and a harbinger of what we can expect for the November election. It failed this time.
But congratulations, Mr. Speaker, you made the big time.
— John Waelti’s column appears every Saturday in the Times. He can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net
