Here & Now

Inside Wisconsin Politics: A Voting by Mail Executive Order

Frederica Freyberg:
President Trump’s executive order for citizen voting lists and preventing the Postal Service from mailing any ballots to people not on those lists, was among the topics on this week’s “Inside Wisconsin Politics.” The WPR and PBS Wisconsin podcast, where you can hear the state’s most experienced political reporters break down the news. It features PBS Wisconsin’s Zac Schultz, WPR’s Shawn Johnson, Anya van Wagtendonk and Rich Kremer. Here they are on the Trump executive order.

Shawn Johnson:
So I think what a lot of people would be rightfully wondering is, is this going to happen? Is this something that is likely to happen in Wisconsin specifically?

Zac Schultz:
The first thing I always look at when these kind of things come out of Trump White House specifically, is what is the reaction for politicians in Wisconsin? We saw universally all the Democrats, including Governor Evers, use a profanity online to describe his reaction to this. And we didn’t see anything from Republicans. And if this had a prayer or a chance of actually being legal or valid in Wisconsin, there would have been some of the usual Trump-supporting Republicans that would have come out and said, “Yes, thank you, President Trump. It’s about time.” I didn’t see any of that. Maybe somewhere it was put out and I missed it. But the overall reaction was a lot of crickets from Republicans. That signals most election observers saying this is completely not legal in Wisconsin, unenforceable in Wisconsin, would remove the right to vote for absentee ballots. We have — you can register on day of. There’s just so many things that do not apply to how Wisconsin elections are run. Barring the fact that it’s not even legal constitutionally across the rest of the country, according to every election expert that we ever talked to. I mean, Shawn, you’ve covered this just as long. It’s not possible for the federal government to dictate how elections are run. That’s done by the states.