The Cruel Truth Behind Wisconsin’s Uncancelled Election

The Republican Party of Wisconsin has put the novel coronavirus to novel use, as an instrument of voter suppression.

Thousands of Wisconsin residents listened to public health authorities and stayed home Tuesday instead of casting ballots in Wisconsin’s presidential primary election. Many others risked contracting COVID-19 as they waited in long lines to vote.

Governor Tony Evers attempted to call off the April 7 election but was overruled by the conservative-dominated Wisconsin Supreme Court. 

State Republicans, backed by justices they have spent millions of dollars to help elect, are hoping that a low-turnout election will buoy Daniel Kelly, their favored candidate for state Supreme Court. 

Kelly, an appointee of former Republican Governor Scott Walker, is seeking election to a ten-year term against challenger Jill Karofsky, a liberal-backed Dane County judge and former state victim rights advocate.  

The extraordinary determination of state Republicans to use the coronavirus crisis for partisan political gain is all the more stunning, given how singularly ill-suited Kelly is to meet the compassionate challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, which will certainly lead to cases that come before the state Supreme Court.

A win by Kelly will ensure that state Republicans will be able to redraw voter boundaries, as they did after the 2010 census.

In blog posts from before Walker tapped him for the court, Kelly repeatedly expressed his contempt for the very idea of government helping people in need. 

“It is true that there will always be people who need help,” Kelly wrote in 2012. “I believe Jesus said as much. But to the extent we conclude from that datum that government must intervene, we do a disservice to those we are supposedly helping, as well as the people from whom we are stealing to provide the ‘help.’”

Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, Kelly was seen as being at a disadvantage, since the presidential preference primary between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, who won Wisconsin in 2016, was expected to draw large numbers of Democrats to the polls. In late 2018, the Republicans who control the state Legislature tried moving the primary to a different date, admittedly in order to improve Kelly’s chances, but the effort was abandoned under protest.

But now that the coronavirus has taken much of the urgency out of the primary—I didn’t see a single TV ad for either Biden or Sanders—Kelly’s chances have dramatically improved. Hence the GOP’s insistence on proceeding with the election, health risks be damned.

On April 6, Evers issued an order delaying the election until June 9. State Supreme Court justices’ terms do not begin until August, so that would have left plenty of time.

The GOP-controlled state Legislature immediately appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which reversed Evers’s edict four hours after it was issued, and ordered the election to take place as (poorly) planned. Kelly did not participate.

That same day, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 along ideological lines to overturn a federal judge’s ruling that would have allowed people an additional week to turn in their absentee ballots; now no absentee ballot that wasn’t turned in or postmarked by Election Day will count.

“The question here is whether tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens can vote safely in the midst of a pandemic,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent. Now “Either they will have to brave the polls, endangering their own and others’ safety. Or they will lose their right to vote, through no fault of their own.”

Evers’s attempt to delay the primary, as fifteen other states have done, was backed by public health authorities and scores of local elected officials. Last week, a Wisconsin federal judge ruled that the federal courts lacked the authority to postpone the election. But the judge, William Conley, called in-person voting “ill-advised in terms of the public health risks and the likelihood of a successful election.” 

On Tuesday, thousands of Wisconsinites either braved the polls or scrambled to turn in their absentee ballots in time.

My wife retrieved her ninety-two-year-old mother’s absentee ballot from the independent community living center where she is, like millions of others, in a state of lockdown; her mother tossed the ballot from a second-story balcony so it could be delivered to a drop-off site.

In Milwaukee, where five open “voting centers” replaced the usual 180 polling places, thousands of people waited in long lines for hours to cast their votes, respecting social distancing mandates as much as possible. In Green Bay, where only two of the city’s usual thirty-one polling sites were open, some voters endured a dangerous three-hour wait.

“Although I remain deeply concerned about the public health implications of voting in person today,” Evers said in a statement on Tuesday, “I am overwhelmed by the bravery, resilience, and heroism of those who are defending our democracy by showing up to vote, working the polls, and reporting on this election. Thank you for giving our state something to be proud of today.”

But many voters simply were cut out of the process. Absentee ballots submitted without a witness signature during a day-long period after Conley said this would be okay before being overruled will not be counted. Others said they never received the absentee ballots they requested.

Milwaukee resident Kaitlin Erickson, twenty-three, told the Wisconsin State Journal she has made three requests for absentee ballots since March 22, but never received one. She stayed home on election day, furious at the Republicans who insisted that the vote go on.

“It just kind of shows me that the Wisconsin GOP doesn’t really care about the lives of the people of Wisconsin,” she said.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, a fractious entity in which one former conservative justice literally put his hands around the neck of a female liberal justice in 2011, is currently dominated by conservatives 5-2. If Kelly wins, conservatives will be assured of maintaining control of the court at least through 2026, assuming the elected justices all finish their current terms. 

A win by Kelly will ensure that state Republicans will be able to redraw voter boundaries, as they did after the 2010 census. In the last election, in 2018, state Republicans won sixty-three of the ninety-nine Assembly seats despite getting just 46 percent of the total vote.

In recent years, several candidates backed by Republicans for the officially nonpartisan court have been associated with extreme words and actions. In 2016, it came to light that Justice Rebecca Bradley, a Walker appointee, had in college writings referred to feminists as “angry, militant, man-hating lesbians who abhor the traditional family,” and to people with AIDS as “degenerates,” suggesting they deserved to die. She apologized for these musings, and won the election.

In 2017, conservatives backed Sauk County Judge Michael Screnock, who as a young man was twice arrested for blocking access to a Madison abortion clinic, for which he professed to have no regrets. Screnock helped defend the state’s Act 10 law kneecapping public employee unions, and the redrawing of voter boundaries to the GOP’s advantage. He lost to liberal-backed rival Rebecca Dallet.

And in 2019, just five months after electing Democrats to every statewide office, including governor and attorney general, Wisconsin elected Brian Hagedorn, Walker’s former chief legal counsel, to the state Supreme Court. Hagendorn helped draft Act 10 and cofounded a Christian school that reserves the right to fire gay teachers and expel gay students, and even students whose parents are gay.

Bradley and Hagedorn, both of whom endorsed Kelly, were among the 4-2 court majority that torpedoed Evers’s effort to postpone the election. 

Kelly’s own repository of extreme statements includes a 2012 blog post lamenting Barack Obama’s reelection as a victory for “the socialism/same-sex marriage/recreational marijuana/tax increase crowd.” He has declared that “marriage is dead” because society has become more accepting of sex outside of matrimony, and decried legal abortion as “a policy that has as its primary purpose harming children.”

Again and again, Kelly has railed against “wealth transfer” programs that help people in need—including, presumably, the crybabies now looking for government assistance due to the coronavirus. 

“This is how we breed resentment: Take from those who create and give it to people who don’t,” Kelly clucked in a 2013 post. “Welfare recipients do not receive their checks as manna from heaven. Someone created that wealth, and then the government forcibly took it.”

On February 27, the day after a gunman murdered five people in Milwaukee, Kelly, who is endorsed by the National Rifle Association, held a fundraiser at a shooting range, with suggested donation amounts tied to gun calibers. This included the “10mm” level of $1,000, an “0.25 ACP” level of $2,500 and a “50 Cal M2HB” level of $5,000.

Late in the campaign, the Republican State Leadership Committee and the state’s largest business lobby group, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, spent at least $1.3 million on ads accusing Karofsky of being soft on crime. 

One ad said Karofsky “went easy” on a child molester, suggesting she enjoys turning violent criminals loose to prey on little kids. In fact, Karofksy had no involvement in that case until well after sentencing. A court refused her campaign’s request to block airing of the ad.

Similar late ads in 2019 helped Hagedorn recover from the loss of critical support related to his bigoted views.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump reiterated his support for Kelly in a series of tweets, including one that identified the professedly non-partisan Kelly as a Republican: “Vote today, Tuesday, for highly respected Republican, Justice Daniel Kelly. Tough on Crime, loves your Military, Vets, Farmers, & will save your 2nd Amendment. A BIG VOTE!”

The Wisconsin election results are not expected to be released until April 13.