What to do

As some of you know, I taught “Introduction to American National Government” this summer in the second half of summer school. (This fact alone, with the events around it, would be worthy of a separate post, but I’m compressing the narrative here to get this written.) It is a requirement in the education, social work, and criminal justice majors, and it’s an elective for a lot of others. My campus does not have a political science major and in fact it’s the only political science class on offer, so it’s a one-off rather than an introduction to the field of study, and given the audience, it has to be focused on practical information. A class like that necessitates at least some reference to current events, and there were a lot of relevant current events in the seven weeks of the accelerated summer session this year.

The last week of the class was about elections, and I cautioned the students to do what all the experts were recommending at that point (after a brutal spring primary election in Wisconsin that became the subject of international news reports):

• make a plan well in advance about where you will vote (this is often a problem for American college students, who don’t necessarily live in the precinct in which they are supposed to vote; one reason the participation rate is so poor for 18-24 year olds is that obstacles to voting are often put in their way by the precincts they do reside in;
• assemble the necessary papers to register (a problem because the GOP has been busy raising the bar for voter identification in Wisconsin for the last decade);
• make sure you are registered well ahead of time (this can be tricky in Wisconsin, because the law allows for same day registration, so people show up at the polls and discover they don’t have the right ID);
• decide on a method (absentee, early voting, or voting on the day) and inform yourself as to the rules and deadlines;
• if voting absentee (which was recommended for a lot of reasons), order the ballot immediately rather than waiting for the deadline, which is only four days before the election itself;
• if voting absentee, mark the ballot as soon as you have decided;
• if voting absentee, take the time to take the ballot to a post office branch and have it manually canceled (which functions as a date stamp) or else bring it back to your local elections collection point by hand;
• make sure the vote arrives well ahead of time so that if it is challenged, you have the opportunity to respond to the challenge.

I followed my own advice. I ordered my first absentee ballot in twelve years in March, and I voted absentee in April and on August 11. On August 12, I ordered the absentee ballot for this November. The town mailed the ballots on September 15 and 16, and I received mine on September 18.

So far, so good. I marked the ballot and was all ready to carry it to the town offices, when:

Two days ago, three trays of mail were discovered, abandoned by the side of the road inside town boundaries. They were not our town’s mail, per the town office’s statement on FB, but they did include absentee ballots, per reporting in the local newspaper.

(Why the heck absentee ballots from elsewhere were found by the side of the road in our town would be interesting to know, but it’s not entirely relevant to my question. That said, my neighbors are busy beating each other up over it on NextDoor. Now if you think Twitter is bad …).

And on the same day, a federal court judge ruled that Wisconsin ballots would be counted as long as they were mailed by Election Day (even if they arrived afterwards) and they were received by six days later. (This responds to one can of worms from April and opens another one, but I’m compressing that part of the narrative, too.) This could potentially be important as the town’s statement also said that approximately a third of registered voters had ordered an absentee ballot by the first day they were mailed out. In any case, the ruling is under appeal.

In a normal year, the bizarre factoid of mail gone wrong wouldn’t matter much, and they’d just replace the ballots, but on the same day, reports surfaced that the Trump campaign is creating a series of strategies for getting swing state absentee ballots declared invalid before they are even counted. And months ago already, the GOP Director of Election Operations made clear that it sees Wisconsin as a prime field for successfully suppressing votes, although he was really focused on the southeast, urban part of the state . Common sense suggests that they couldn't do it on a case by case basis; that would take too long. It would have to be on a categoric basis.

So, also on Tuesday, the new "expert advice" came out -- if you can, vote in person. It will be much harder to suppress your vote in that way. (The GOP contingency plans for suppressing in person votes -- which they are not hiding! -- involve subverting the Electoral College in the state legislatures, but that's not something I can do much to influence either way.)

This is still possible for me -- I can vote at my precinct on election day as long as I don't make use of the absentee ballot.

If I lived in Texas, still, I wouldn't worry about it, as the Democratic Party hasn't carried Texas since 1976, when I was seven, and although it's supposedly closer this time, I doubt it will flip. Wisconsin was decided for Trump by about 22,000 votes last time. There are way more than that in absentee ballots in circulation this time. If it were close in favor of Biden, I would think the Trump campaign would definitely try to flip the count in some way. (Obviously the Biden campaign would try the same if the situation were reversed, but I think it would be limited to [another] recount [like in 2016]; it can't imagine they'd try a preemptive attempt to negate all the absentee ballots.)

I hate this. I hate that a first world country can't get its voting together (Wisconsin is a symptom of much wider problems). I hate that I would have to break our heavy isolation to do this, in a state where I'm legally allowed to request an absentee ballot at any time without giving a reason. I've talked about my precinct before, and I hate that this situation calls upon me to become suspicious of my family's friends and neighbors. Several of the poll workers are the same women who taught me in Sunday School decades ago. I hate the way the Trump Administration seems to have both drawn the entire country into paranoia and also substantiated the threat enough that it's not paranoia, but actual anxiety.

I hate that what I'm dealing with now is something Black voters have to deal with in every election.

I hate that every time I think things can't get any worse, they do.

~ by Servetus on September 24, 2020.