Ironically, the effort by Wisconsin and national Republicans to tilt the April 7 election partly failed, when a wide majority of voters elected a liberal justice to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The reason that Republican legislators resisted postponing the election was to try to finesse a court majority, Wisconsin's leading conservative pundit explained before the vote.
What happened in Wisconsin has many takeaways. Among those, it suggests that states with Democratic governors and Republican legislatures will disagree on the means and rules for voting in 2020 -- even in a pandemic.
That tension can be seen in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Kentucky, where decisions have yet to be made about the extent to which the states will shift to voting early or voting by mail in upcoming primaries, and the details of how those elections will be run.
In Nevada, tensions between Democrats (including the governor) and the Republican secretary of state over voter outreach and voting options in its June primary led Elias to sue on April 16 on behalf of state and national Democrats.
Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske wanted to send absentee ballot applications only to longtime voters and restrict in-person voting to one site in each county -- including Las Vegas. The suit says those factors, atop state laws that ban volunteers from helping others to vote and allowing officials to disqualify ballots based on how signatures look, would "cause extensive disenfranchisement" on par with Wisconsin.
"Eighty-seven percent of the population of the state will have two voting locations," said Elias, referring to Las Vegas and Reno. "In addition, when we talk about vote by mail and automatic vote by mail, the question is, 'Who gets a ballot?' 'Who are those ballots automatically mailed to?' So in the case of Nevada, they're sending ballots only to what they refer to as 'active' voters. In Nevada, because it is a highly transient population" there were 50,000 'inactive' voters in 2016 and 2018, who in fact voted. So those 50,000 voters wouldn't get a ballot."
Wisconsin's primary was a mess. But it revealed little about the best ways to run the primaries that will soon be held and elections this summer and fall. Before the pandemic delayed spring primaries, some were likely to be chaotic anyway for reasons that have nothing to do with partisan voter suppression.
In states like Pennsylvania that have yet to hold primaries or caucuses, election officials planned to debut new voting technology. Earlier this year, introducing new systems in states such as Iowa, Nevada, South Carolina and California contributed to hours-long waits for voters, scrambled registration records, voting machinery failures and uncertain outcomes. But technical snafus were not the only cause.
Another factor was voters' habits. In Los Angeles, the nation's largest election district, officials assumed that voters would take advantage of 10 days of newly instituted early voting. But most L.A. voters did not, which contributed to long delays on Super Tuesday. People tend to vote in the ways that they are familiar with -- whether early, at polls, by mail, etc. That was another reason why the Democrats sued Nevada, Elias said.
"In Nevada, for example, 93 percent of the population voted in person in the last election," he said. "This is a state with a strong culture of in-person voting. They have in-person vote-anywhere centers. Throughout counties, people vote early over an extended early voting period." So, against that backdrop, the Republican secretary of state announced that they were going to close all but one polling location in every county."
Since the pandemic broke, the nationwide response by governors, secretaries of state, state election directors, election boards, and county officialshas generally been to look to more absentee voting and less in-person voting. While the state-by-state details of how that will work are starting to surface, some trends are emerging.
Upcoming Primaries and ElectionsStates with histories of partisan voting rights fights are still seeing this tension. These states are not necessarily the presidential swing states, but increasingly purple states like Texas and Georgia. Even though Republicans hold the most powerful state posts, not all high-ranking GOP officials agree about how far election managers should go to facilitate voting by mail.
In Georgia, where there will be a contested Democratic U.S. Senate primary in June, the Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is sending absentee ballot applications to 6.9 million "active voters," meaning any resident who has voted or contacted the state in the past five years. But 300,000 infrequent but still registered voters will not get one. Raffensperger's decision drew criticism from both sides of the aisle. (Republican secretaries in Iowa and Nevada also are only sending absentee ballot applications to active voters.)
Georgia's House Speaker told a radio host that Republicans could not win in high turnout elections -- criticizing Raffensperger, who replied that this outreach was only for the primary. Days later, the secretary created an absentee ballot fraud task force, which Abrams said was intended to strike fear in voters. A decade ago, the state's current governor, ex-Secretary of State Brain Kemp, "put 12 people in jail, facing 120 felonies, on false accusations of absentee ballot fraud," Abrams said.
"That [task force] was designed to have a chilling effect on participation," Abrams said. "We know that heading into this election, it is not simply the actions that are taken at the ballot box that will stop people from voting; it's also creating a miasma of fear that tries" to target black, Latino, Native American voters, but also young voters, and scare people to not take advantage of these opportunities" to vote.
Georgia was not the only state with Republican disagreements.
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