This story is from the New York Times Magazine by Emily Bazelon:
In March, as a wave of states began delaying their spring primaries because of the coronavirus, Wisconsin’s election, scheduled for April 7, loomed. The ballot for that day included the presidential primary, thousands of local offices and four state-wide judgeships, including a key seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. On March 17, the day after Ohio postponed its spring election, voting rights groups asked Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, to do the same. “No one wanted the election to happen more than us, but it felt like this wave was about to hit our communities,” Angela Lang, the founder and executive director of the Milwaukee group Black Leaders Organizing for Community, a non-profit organization, told me.
While Evers weighed the idea of postponement, BLOC encouraged residents to apply for absentee ballots, which any registered Wisconsin voter can do by requesting one online. But some voters were struggling to figure out how to upload their identification from their phones to the state’s MyVote website. City officials reported that they couldn’t keep up with the overwhelming demand for absentee ballots; applications in Milwaukee rose from a typical daily count of 100 or so to between 7,000 and 8,000. “People were waiting on their ballots and asking where they were,” Lang said. “We needed a plan. But we knew the governor was in a tough position with the Legislature.”
The Wisconsin Assembly and Senate are firmly in the hands of Republicans, who drew a gerrymandered map a decade ago that has allowed them to retain a majority in the State Assembly even though they won only 47 percent of the vote in 2012 and less than 45 percent in 2018. Lang, who is 30, grew up in the city and started BLOC to increase political engagement — and power — in Milwaukee’s mostly black and low-income neighborhoods. And Evers won in 2018 (defeating Scott Walker, a Republican seeking a third term) thanks in part to larger-than-usual turnout by black and Latino voters.
Read the full story here.
David Anderson says
We will TOTALLY loose our right to vote.
It’ll be like that Wisconsin fiasco recently
OR
Just as we get to more states postal voting (a sure win for us) the Repubs will finish their long worked on task of utterly destroying the Post Office.
Understand their persecution/defunding the USPO is not JUST their hatred of anything government it is a true plan to disenfranchise postal voters. Fuckers.
Meanwhile they’re disenfranchising by the thousands quietly, Gerrymandering where they can and blocking felon voting in Florida with the devotion of a suicide bomber in a rage.
Fuckers FUCKERS.