The Guardian: Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die

Less than 72 hours before polls opened in Wisconsin on 7 April, the state legislature convened to weigh an emergency request from the governor, Tony Evers. With Covid-19 cases in the thousands, Evers implored the lawmakers to delay in-person voting for the state’s presidential primary and mail a ballot to every voter in the state.

It was a meeting only in name. Republicans, who control 63 of 99 seats in the state assembly, sent just one member. He brought the session to order and then immediately ended it without taking up the governor’s request. It took just 17 seconds. In the Republican-controlled state senate, the same thing happened, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It took even less time.

The legislature’s defiance was a naked display of unabashed power – an elected body refusing its governor’s request and turning its back on its constituents in a time of crisis.

The Republican lawmakers who didn’t even bother to show up for the emergency session on Saturday knew that their re-election was guaranteed because of a successful party effort over the last 10 years to entrench themselves in power. Even in a state at the center of some of the most hard-nosed fights over voting, it was a stunning series of events. …

“I don’t think many people who are aware of what’s going on, and are tuned into politics and government in this state, would say that it’s anything even resembling a democracy,” said Jay Heck, the executive director of the Wisconsin chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group.

On Tuesday, voters risked their lives to go to the polls, waiting hours in line in Milwaukee. So far, turnout looks like it will be a fraction of what it was in 2016, and that is believed to benefit Republicans, who were seeking to maintain control of a seat on the conservative-leaning state supreme court. It was the state supreme court who voted along partisan lines to overrule Evers’ last-minute effort and to allow the election to move forward. …

A few weeks after the 2016 election, Greenwood and a team of lawyers helped convince a three-judge panel to strike down the gerrymandered assembly map, saying it was so severely manipulated that it violated the US constitution. But in 2018, the US supreme court, in a 5-4 vote, overruled the lower court on technical grounds and sent the case back for further review. One year later, it would rule that federal courts could do nothing to stop partisan gerrymandering.

The 2018 decision in Wisconsin came just a few months before a November election that may have marked the pinnacle of the redistricting effort. That fall, Republicans lost every statewide election, including the governor’s race. But the Democrats, with 190,000 more votes, won just 36 seats in the state legislature. Republicans still held control of 63, losing just one seat.

“They view this as an opportunity to be able to extend one-party rule in this state for another 10 years,” Heck said. “If they can do that, they can do it in a great many other states as well.”