“Before you got inside, there was still a line going around the whole block,” recounted Erick Torres-Gonzalez ‘23, a resident of Milwaukee, in an interview with the HPR. “A lot of people weren’t 6 feet apart when they were in line. When I went in, the few people who were leading the polling station were dressed up in gowns — they had facemasks, they had gloves, they were wiping down everything. But no one in line had any of that. It’s crazy … all 600,000 people who live in Milwaukee only had 5 places to go.”
As Torres-Gonzalez describes, Wisconsin residents woke up on April 7 facing an impossible decision: go outside in the middle of a pandemic, or leave their votes uncounted. While 16 other states successfully postponed their elections, Wisconsin residents were forced to put their health on the line. In a chaotic lead-up to the day-of meltdown, the state’s Democratic Governor, Tony Evers, waited until the day before the election to issue an executive order postponing it to June. Hours later, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court blocked the order, putting every one of the state’s nearly 3.4 million registered voters directly in harm’s way. On a party-line vote, the four voting Republican members of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court (a fifth up for reelection recused himself) voted to have the election in the middle of a pandemic, while the court’s two Democratic members dissented.
Also on Monday, a U.S. District Court Judge’s order allowing ballots received six days after the election to be counted (accounting for delays in an already strained postal system) was overturned. This time, the U.S. Supreme Court made the decision, ruling that “lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”
Given this lack of leniency on accepting mail-in ballots, using one was not an option for many. “I first requested my absentee ballot when I was on campus, but it never arrived,” explained Gonzalez. “So I had to redo it, change my address to my house here in Wisconsin. It got here only two days before the actual election, so I couldn’t just mail it in, because then it wouldn’t have arrived on time. So I had to go drop it off at one of the five polling stations that were open, out of the 180 that were supposed to be open.”
Meanwhile, many other college students he spoke to never received their ballots altogether.
“A lot of my friends go to [the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and there were thousands of students who didn’t receive their ballot at all. … [One friend] requested a ballot and it never arrived, and she waited up until Monday, the day of the election, and it still never arrived. So she was forced to go to the polling place.”
An Unequal Burden
Despite a plethora of stories like Gonzalez’s, General reports of Covid-related fears and mass polling place closures are not the full story of Wisconsin’s election disaster. The chaos of Wisconsin’s elections was not distributed equally — and this inequality was not an oversight.
“It’s Black and Brown communities of Wisconsin that were affected the most,” Gonzalez explained. “A lot of COVID deaths are concentrated in the North Side of Milwaukee, which is where there’s the African-American community.” From early data, ProPublica estimated 81% of Milwaukee County’s reported COVID-19 deaths and almost half of its infected were African-American residents, in a county that’s only 26% Black.
It was those same Milwaukee residents who were most affected by the state’s decision to hold the election in-person on April 7. Urban areas were hardest-hit by both the virus itself and the ensuing lack of polling places, meaning that many showed up to closed polling places, requested absentee ballots they never received, or waited in long, dangerous lines. Meanwhile, Republican-leaning White conservatives in rural areas less affected by the virus showed up to polling places in far greater numbers.
How could a state Senate allow its most-affected residents to be so unable to reach the polls? The answer is simple: 97% of Black voters voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2012, and 92% did in 2016. In response, as Republicans made gains in the state Senate, they implemented very strict voter ID laws successfully targeting young and minority voters. In 2017, the New York Times reported at least 17,000 voters “were kept from the polls in [the 2016 election] by the state’s strict voter ID law.” These efforts, among others, paid off. By one estimate, voter turnout among Black residents of Wisconsin dropped 19 points in only four years. When 70% of Wisconsin’s Black residents live in Milwaukee, choosing to hold an election there with five polling places for 600,000 people cannot be seen as anything other than voter suppression.
Put another way, a state described as “the Home of Black Incarceration” and facing the worst Black-White unemployment disparity in the country deprived citizens at highest risk for COVID-19 of their vote when it mattered most. In a culmination of years of gerrymandering, targeted voter ID laws, and racist policing and sentencing, Republican judiciaries held an election very likely to re-elect a fifth Republican justice to the state Supreme Court. Unstopped, the projected election results may cement this unrepresentative authority in the state for decades.
This particular flashpoint in a wider global crisis has revealed not just that voter suppression is an immediate threat to our democracy. It has shown it is also an imminent public health issue. Last week, ProPublica reported that even before COVID-19 hit Wisconsin, “in Milwaukee, simply being black means your life expectancy is 14 years shorter, on average, than someone white.” Against this backdrop of unbelievably unequal health outcomes, it is no wonder Black residents of cities like Milwaukee are being so disproportionately hurt by this virus. But as long as many of them vote for Democrats, their own leaders seem determined to silence them.
By holding an election violently biased against Wisconsin’s urban and Black and Latino populations, Wisconsin’s Republican judges didn’t just seize an opportunity to get a leg up. They put partisanship above public health in utter disregard for the lives of their fellow citizens.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Daderot