Bids to alter Wisconsin elections fall mostly along partisan lines | Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service
Anya van Wagtendonk (Wisconsin Watch)
March 10, 2021
Proposals to change Wisconsin’s voting system coulddetermine how one of America’s top swing states picks congressional candidates,how it awards its 10 Electoral College votes, how fast results can be announcedand who can use the increasingly popular method of absentee voting.
But the political divisiveness that caused Wisconsin to flipfrom red to blue by the slimmest of margins in the 2020 presidential race willlikely continue, stymying all but a few bipartisan proposals. A Republican-ledLegislature and Democratic governor mean that purely partisan priorities areunlikely to make their way through, experts told Wisconsin Watch.
And a sweeping Democratic bill to broaden access to votingand thwart partisan gerrymandering nationally faces a steep climb in the U.S.Senate after passing the House on a party-line vote late Wednesday.
In recent weeks, lawmakers nationwide have proposed hundredsof bills to change states’ voting laws following the contentious Novemberpresidential election. Wisconsin is no exception.
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Democrats generally seek to make it easier to vote, citingnational security assessments that the 2020 contest was among the most secureever. Republicans insist the high-turnout election was rife with fraud —although election officials of both parties and judges at all levels have rejected those
allegations— and generally seek to add more restrictions and safeguards.
In late February, Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislaturebegan circulating a slate of bills that would, among other changes, tighten absentee voting and the definition of “indefinitely confined” voters. President Donald Trump’scampaign challenged these components inDemocratic-majority Dane and Milwaukee counties in a December recount. ThreeDemocratic members of the Assembly Elections Committee called the proposals “a full-on assault on
our elections and the ability for Wisconsinites to vote.”
But dramatic changes to Wisconsin’s election laws areunlikely in the short term, said David Canon, a political scientist atUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Any efforts aimed at making it easier to vote aren’t goingto happen because the Republican leadership and state Legislature won’t want todo that. Anything that’s aimed at restricting access to voting won’t happenbecause (Democratic Gov. Tony) Evers would veto that, and they wouldn’t haveenough votes to override the veto,” Canon said.
Aspokesperson for Evers declined comment on which bills he was likely to sign orveto, but referred Wisconsin Watch to the governor’s proposed budget, which includes proposals toestablish automatic voter registration; expand the timeline on absentee voting;and require the Legislature to consider the recommendations of Evers’ People’sMaps Commission when drawing new political boundaries this year.
Atiba Ellis, a law professor at Marquette Universityfocusing on voting rights, said both election security and voter access areimportant. “They do not have to be at odds,” Ellis said. “But I think forpolitically motivated reasons they are put at odds, and that then justifies passinglaws that are stricter than what the political science data says they need tobe.”
There is some bipartisan agreement, including a proposal to bring ranked-choice voting to Wisconsin. In that system,congressional primaries would be nonpartisan, with the top five finishers,regardless of party, continuing to the general election, when they would beranked by voters.
Another bipartisan idea, which failed to make it through thelast session, would allow clerks to process absentee
ballotsbefore Election Day. Supporters say this would enhance voter confidence bypreventing a delay in declaring statewide winners.
According to the Brennan Center for
Justice,43 states are weighing 253 bills to restrict voter access, while a differentset of 43 states is weighing at least 704 bills that would expand votingaccess. Lawmakers are particularly focused on absentee voting, the Brennan Centerfound, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which kept a significant portion ofthe electorate from going to the polls on Election Day.
Process
ballots sooner
In Wisconsin, Republicans and Democrats find some agreementaround when absentee ballots can be processed. Wisconsin law bars processinguntil polls open on Election Day. In November, this meant that workers atMilwaukee’s central count worked until early morning, opening, unfolding andrunning hundreds of thousands of ballots through tabulating machines.
The Trump campaign capitalized on the overnight count tofalsely claim that Milwaukee had “dumped” ballots that swung the election forPresident Joe Biden.
“What people didn’t understand is those votes came in inMilwaukee at 2 in the morning because that was the first time the electionsofficials had the chance to get to the machines and feed in the ballots,” saidKathleen Dolan, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
An easy fix would be to process absentee ballots beforeElection Day, experts say. In the last legislative session, lawmakers debated bipartisan legislation to allow this to happen, but thebill languished amid disagreement over details, including how differentmunicipalities would adapt that practice.
Republican lawmakers are again taking up the issue, but divisions are emerging over whether to optfor early processing, or change the rules for early voting. Rather than placingballots in envelopes that election workers process later, some lawmakers proposeletting early in-person voters directly feed their ballots into votingmachines.
Diane Coenen, Oconomowoc city clerk and former president ofthe Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association, said the latter method would allowfor instant detection of ballot errors — and buy time for busy clerks and pollworkers to work with in-person voters.
Congress mulls big changes
Nationally, Democraticlawmakers are pushing a sweeping voting reform package, HR 1, which includesautomatic voter registration and would bar voter ID and witness requirementsfor mail-in voting. It also seeks to reduce “dark money” in campaigns andrequire states to create nonpartisan redistricting commissions to preventpartisan gerrymandering.
Republicans havedecried the package, saying it would restrict free speech and usurp states’rights. Many also oppose changes to redistricting processes.
The bill passed in the House, but,facing this opposition, pundits say it faces a steep hill towards passage inthe Senate. Biden has signaled he would sign it.
On Sunday, Bidenissued an executive order requiring federalagencies to expand dissemination of information about registration and votingand other measures. The order coincided with the 56th anniversary of “BloodySunday,” when state troopers beat and tear-gassed voting rights activists inSelma, Alabama.
Electoral
College, drop boxes debated
Wisconsin is one of several states also considering changing how toaward electors.
As proposed, Wisconsin would award them by
congressional district, rather than winner-takes-all. In 2020, this would haveresulted in six of the state’s 10 electors going for Trump, rather than Biden,who narrowly won the state’s popular vote. Because of Wisconsin’s partisangerrymandering of congressional districts, experts say the proposal wouldredistribute electoral power away from the areas that hold Wisconsin’s urban —and mostly Democratic — strongholds.
Republicanlawmakers supportive of these and other proposals say they would restore faithin the fairness of elections.
Sen.Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville, who is sponsoring many of the not-yet-introducedbills, said he is concerned about the huge jump in the number of people whoclaim to be “indefinitely confined,” meaning they can vote absentee withoutpresenting a photo ID.
Stroebelalso criticized the proliferation of drop boxes in the November election.These receptacles are not regulated by state law, although electionsofficials say they comply with federal guidance on how they should be secured.
“Throughout2020, gaps, loopholes and outright violations of the clear intent of the lawplagued the election process,” Stroebel said in a statement to Wisconsin Watch.“The COVID-19 pandemic combined with a hotly contested presidential electionwere a tremendous stress on the system, and offered the Wisconsin ElectionsCommission and some — but not all — local election officials a chance todisregard the plain meaning of the law.”
OneGOP bill would dictate that each municipality must have no more than
one drop box— so hundreds of thousands of voters in Milwaukee would have the same number ofabsentee ballot boxes as a town with a few hundred voters.
Stroebel said this and other measures are aimed atintroducing uniformity across the state to create “complete trust in ourelections” and ensure that absentee ballot procedures “comply with existingstatutes.”
Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor at the Democracy Fund, aWashington, D.C.-based voting advocacy group, countered that drop boxes are “embraced all across thecountry” but Republicans demonized them in 2020 as “somehow jeopardizing theintegrity of the election — and that is really problematic.”
Wisconsin voting mostly smooth
Despitethe rancor, experts say Wisconsin’s elections tend to be well-run.
“Byand large, people who are in charge of our elections do their jobs well andacquit themselves well,” Dolan said.
Problems in November were “limited and site-specific, ratherthan the result of a generalized inability of the system to handle a large turnoutamid changes in the law,” according to a report by a coalition of Wisconsin groupsthat favor expansive access to voting. One marker of success: a plunging rateof rejected ballots, 0.2% in November compared to 1.8% in April.
While Wisconsin ranks high on many measures of electionadministration, experts and advocates say more changes could be made to improvethe experience for voters and election workers alike, including creating apermanent absentee voting list; creating more lead time to request absenteeballots to account for postal delays; enacting two-way ballot tracking; andclarifying when and how clerks can fix absentee ballot envelope errors.
UW-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer, whostudies election administration, said that, while there was a lot of talk aboutfraud in the 2020 general election, the bigger danger to election integrity isvoter disenfranchisement.
“You have to worry about the things that are actually real,”Mayer said. “And one of the things that undermines the integrity of theelection process is when you have lots of people … who are unable to vote,whether it’s long lines or (voter) ID (requirements) or other things — thatthat’s actually a threat to the integrity of the system.”
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