‘It is terrifying’: Wisconsin leaders warn of coronavirus disaster with Tuesday’s vote

Voting-rights advocates are doing the unthinkable in Wisconsin: urging voters not to go to the polls on Tuesday.

The coronavirus epidemic has turned their calculations upside down in the state, where the federal government has declared a "major disaster," Gov. Tony Evers has ordered residents to stay home — and in-person voting is still scheduled to take place Tuesday in the presidential primary and state and local elections, barring a last-minute intervention from the state Legislature, which Evers called into a Saturday special session.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the state to expand absentee voting ahead of Tuesday's elections, but he declined to postpone the election because he said he did not have the authority to do so. That has left a number of politicians and voting-rights advocates having to weigh a public health crisis colliding with a crisis of democracy — and they are coming down on the health side.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who is running for reelection, urged voters not to go to the polls Tuesday, a call joined by some other local elected officials and activists. Jay Heck, director of Common Cause Wisconsin, a voting-rights group, likened the spring election to a cosmic calamity.

"The upcoming election is hurtling toward the state of Wisconsin like some unstoppable meteor," said Heck. "It is terrifying, because nobody knows what's going to happen."

Evers announced Friday that he would call a special session of the Legislature the next day and asked legislators to take an “up-or-down vote to send a ballot to every registered voter by May 19 … and to extend the time for those ballots to be received by May 26.” Evers had in the past rejected calls for postponing the election, infuriating Democrats in the state, but has previously called for a mail-in election on April 7. The governor called for the vast majority of in-person voting to be suspended, save for limited availability for disabled voters and voters who struggle with reading or writing in English.

The governor has maintained that his hands were tied by the Republicans who control the Legislature. They have bucked calls to postpone the election. But Sam Munger, a Democratic political consultant and former aide to Evers who has talked with several Democratic legislators, said “nobody thinks that it is very likely that the Republican Legislature will seriously take up the governor’s proposal.”

Wisconsin House Speaker Robin Vos and state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald released a joint statement rejecting Evers’ call, calling the governor’s leadership “feckless” and ineffective.

“Hundreds of thousands of workers are going to their jobs every day, serving in essential roles in our society. There’s no question that an election is just as important as getting take-out food,” they said. “We continue to support what Gov. Evers has supported for weeks: The election should continue as planned on Tuesday.”

Tuesday’s election could potentially disenfranchise scores of thousands voters who will be unable to obtain or return an absentee ballot in time and fear going to the polls.

“What this is going to do is further disenfranchise voters from participating in electoral politics,” said Marcelia Nicholson, a Milwaukee County supervisor. The city of Milwaukee usually has 1,400 election workers spread across 180 voting sites. Now, the city is down to just 350 poll workers, and will have in-person voting centers at just five sites, the Milwaukee Election Commission announced on Friday. The city of Green Bay will have just two in-person voting sites instead of the usual 31.

“Despite this pandemic, despite Milwaukee’s [high coronavirus case rate] … you telling them that they need to go to the polls and vote and is akin to telling them to go vote in a hurricane. It is crazy,” Nicholson said.

Both Heck and Nicholson said they can’t in good conscience tell people to go to the polls in person on Tuesday, and encouraged voters to request an absentee ballot, as many other officials in the state had. The deadline to request the absentee ballot is Friday evening, and that was after a court-ordered extension.

A record-smashing 1.2 million people had requested an absentee ballot as of Friday morning, according to data from the state elections board. But that’s well short of the 2.1 million people who voted in the spring election in 2016, when both parties had a competitive presidential primary, meaning potentially tens of thousands of voters, if not more, could be be forced to go to the polls.

U.S. District Judge William Conley also extended the deadline for absentee ballots to be returned to 4 p.m. on April 13, and waived a witness signature requirement for voters who were unable to “safely obtain a witness certification despite reasonable efforts to do so.”

Following an appeal, the 7th Circuit restored the witness signature requirement. The court, however, left the extended absentee ballot timeline in place.

The Republican National Committee, state Republican Party and the GOP-controlled Legislature all appealed the order. In its appeal, the Legislature argued that Conley’s order was a “belated judicial rewrite of Wisconsin’s voting laws” that opened up the process to fraud and effectively allowed voters to cast ballots after Election Day, because ballots had only a time they were required to be returned but no postmark deadline.

Across the state, election clerks are facing a dramatic shortage of poll workers that could exacerbate the health risk to workers and voters. A report from the Wisconsin Elections Commission on Tuesday found that nearly 60 percent of Wisconsin’s municipalities were reporting a shortage of poll workers, and the situation has continued to deteriorate in some areas in the state.

“Voting will be occurring in some of the city’s hot spots and we’re very concerned about the public having to choose between voting and their personal safety, but also the election itself acting as a hot spot of spreading the virus,” Neil Albrecht, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, said. Albrecht has called for in-person voting to be canceled.

Albrecht estimated that around 100,000 voters in the city will vote in this year’s election, down from nearly 168,000 in the 2016 spring election. So far, 75,000 Milwaukee residents have already voted via absentee, and Albrecht expects somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 people to vote in person on Election Day.

“Voting is important and democracy is important,” he continued. “But when you think about the number of people that will be disenfranchised in an election that’s occurring in a pandemic, and when you think about the public health risk, this is not democracy.”