Monday, June 1, 2020

No surprise - voter roll purge taken up by WI Supreme Court

The WI GOP Legislator/Litigator Complex is at their voter suppression game again.

Remember that the Wisconsin State Supreme Court wiped out at the behest of GOP legislators a science-based 'Safer-at-Home' Covid-19 mitigation plan - after earlier forcing voters to go out into the pandemic to cast in-person April election ballots.

And now the Court has found yet another way to monkey-wrench the electoral process.

As just reported by the AP's Scott Bauer. 
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case seeking to purge registrations of about 200,000 voters who may have moved The court agreed Monday to take the case after earlier deadlocking 3-3.
I'm waiting to see if out-going Justice Daniel Kelly voted to hear the case. I presume he did, since he'd signaled (will-wink) that he would, then later confirmed it.

If lame-duck GOP legislators and their defeated Governor can exercise lame-duck power to knee-cap the incoming Democratic Governor, why not let the Supreme Court Justice who was only a Walker appointee before getting shellacked in the April election enjoy one last helping of sour grapes?

2:00 p.m. update - the briefing schedule reportedly could take the case's conclusion past the July 31 end of Kelly's term. The report also indicates the number of potentially-invalidated registrants is now at 129,000:
Wisconsin Supreme Court to decide whether to remove 129,000 voters from the rolls
And why is this happening now?

Because entrenched Republican legislators and the special interests they serve saw their decade of urban and minority voting suppression fail to re-elect both Kelly in April and Walker in 2018.

So, surprise, surprise, the high court has chosen to hear, and then presumably delete en masse more than 200,000 registered Wisconsin voters from the voter rolls over their perhaps having moved.

Forcing everyone of them to gather up their paperwork and re-register, and knowing that some percentage will find it too difficult or inconvenient to make the effort.

Even a few thousand discouraged voters could be pivotal in a state which seems pretty evenly divided, which is why Republicans have been at this in Wisconsin for years with tactic after tactic.

It's another abuse of taxpayer money and the levers of government by the GOP legislator/litigator complex to flush fairness, further embed corporate-friendly Republican policies and tip the state and maybe even the Presidency to Trump for another four years.

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2 comments:

  1. Would they take the case if they couldn't rule in favor of the GOP?

    ReplyDelete
  2. One would think these "fine republicans" would wish voters make the decision and wait until the voters choice is seated on the bench, after all it's how they did a SCOTUS nominee.

    ReplyDelete