Over 80% of Republican state lawmakers in Wisconsin voted by mail—while forcing others to the polls
This post was originally published on this site
Back in April, Wisconsin Republicans fought bitterly to prevent mail-in voting during a pandemic, instead demanding that voters instead wait in long lines to cast in-person votes despite the literal danger to their lives.
The Associated Press now reports that of those Republican state senators and assembly members, over 80% of them themselves voted absentee in the same election. Specifically, 81% of Republican assembly members and 83% of Republican state senators voted by mail. Surprise!
It is not actually a surprise, of course. Wisconsin Republicans have been among the most active in putting up roadblocks to voting, and despite the overt bullshit spewed by party leadership Republicans demanded a host of new restrictions on absentee ballots, all of them more disadvantageous to poor voters than other voters.
There’s a lot of talk about how the heavy use of mail-in ballots by Republican leaders, from 80% of Wisconsin’s Republican lawmakers to Donald Trump and Mike Pence (both of whom screwed up their absentee ballot applications in ways that could result in election fraud charges for Lesser Americans, because of course they did), shows hypocrisy on the part of the Republican Party. This is not true. The Republican Party is now fully fascist in nature: Their objection to vote-by-mail is not that nobody should vote by mail, but that people who do not support them should not be allowed to vote by mail.
Each Republican roadblock to voting is aimed at Black Americans, at poor Americans, at young Americans, and toward any other group that disproportionately votes against them. This has been true for a half-century. College identification cards are deemed insufficient proof of identity; gun permits are allowed. Insufficient allocation of voting booths result in hours-long wait times in communities that vote against the party; conservative suburbs may see no voting lines at all.
It is an attempt to cling to power and to racism before demographic tides make a hundred different Republican “policies” impossible to maintain. There is no particular hypocrisy in a raw grab for power, only corruption.