Washington Post: Wisconsin goes it alone, holding elections next week amid fears of infection and voting chaos

04.1.2020 / By Amy Gardner
Washington Post: Wisconsin goes it alone, holding elections next week amid fears of infection and voting chaos

Democrats and voting activists have accused GOP lawmakers of trying to suppress voter turnout intentionally to help an incumbent candidate for the state Supreme Court, conservative Justice Daniel Kelly, win reelection. “They have cynically calculated that lower turnout will help the conservative candidate,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin.

In Tuesday’s Wisconsin elections, more than 100 municipalities will not have enough poll workers to open a single voting location. Tens of thousands of voters who have flooded election offices with mail-ballot requests in recent days are at risk of not receiving them on time. And Sally Cohen, an elderly woman with kidney disease and asthma who is self-isolating in her apartment in Madison, isn’t sure she’ll be able to vote at all because of a state law requiring a witness to sign her ballot envelope.

“I was just distraught this morning when I opened it and saw that you have to have a witness,” said Cohen, who is 77 and a retired paralegal. “I thought, ‘I just can’t do it.’ They suggested having the mailman look through the picture window, but I’m on the third floor, so that won’t work.”

Across Wisconsin, voters, election officials and civil rights leaders are angry that the state legislature is going forward with the April 7 presidential primary and local elections even as the coronavirus continues its march across the country. The public-health risk is too high, and asking voters to venture out of their homes directly contradicts state and local emergency orders to shelter in place, they say.

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