Here & Now

Reaction and Fallout after the April 7 Election

Frederica Freyberg:

You’ll notice we are coming to you from outside the PBS Wisconsin studios. Engineers and support staff are remotely bringing you our picture. Our interview guests will appear via video conference. And our reporters are ingeniously producing stories out of their homes. Our web news editors are turning articles for online reading. With that understanding of how “Here & Now” is working right now, we begin with a report on Tuesday’s election from which we will not see results until Monday due to an extension for clerks to count absentee ballots. Senior Political Reporter Zac Schultz reports on the potential fallout from our spring election.

Female voter:

This makes no sense today.

Voter:

No.

Zac Schultz:

Wisconsin’s 2020 pandemic election will be remembered for many things.

Male Voter:

We only have five polling places in the city and I’ve been out here for almost two hours.

Zac Schultz:

There were long lines in Milwaukee full of voters wearing masks.

Robin Vos:

You are incredibly safe to go out.

Zac Schultz:

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos worked as a poll worker in Burlington.

Man:

I signed up for an absentee ballot for my wife and I two weeks ago and never got them.

Zac Schultz:

But most of all, voters across the state were angry at a situation that required them to risk contracting the COVID-19 virus in order to vote.

Richard Saks:

Well, in our view, yesterday was truly a tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of voters were basically forced to make a very cruel decision.

Zac Schultz:

Richard Saks is one of the lawyers who filed suit in federal court trying to delay the election for all the reasons we saw. In that case, U.S. Judge William Conley ruled he didn’t have the authority to stop the election, but he did say he could revisit the results.

Richard Saks:

He was open and amenable to reviewing post-election, whether or not what we foretold actually happened.

Zac Schultz:

Saks says he has evidence of hundreds and likely thousands of cases of voter disenfranchisement where because of the pandemic, voters were not able to cast a ballot, either due to long wait times at a reduced number of polling locations or an inability to get an absentee ballot.

Richard Saks:

The issue we would present to him would be very serious evidence about voters who were denied the right to vote and how the denial of their right to vote changed the course of this election.

Barry Burden:

My guess is there will be some litigation. This is how Wisconsin works now. When a group is unhappy, they go to court to seek a remedy.

Zac Schultz:

Barry Burden is a political scientist professor at UW-Madison. He says voter turnout numbers in spring elections can be very different year to year depending what is on the ballot. So it can be difficult to prove voters who stayed home did so due to the pandemic.

Barry Burden:

If you’re suing under, say, the Voting Rights Act, then disparities between racial and ethnic groups are the important factor. But it’s hard to do in Wisconsin. The voter file that the state keeps, the database of all the voters, doesn’t include the race of the voter.

Zac Schultz:

Saks says they’re studying turnout numbers in African-American wards in Milwaukee because under the Voting Rights Act, minority voters have special protections.

Richard Saks:

And if in fact minority voters as a group were supporting a particular candidate that they wanted to see elected and that candidate wasn’t elected because the Republican legislature insisted upon those voters coming out to vote in the midst of a pandemic, that would be in my mind a very serious violation of all those voters’ right to vote.

Zac Schultz:

The question then is what could a judge do to fix the problem after the election.

Richard Saks:

In terms of what remedy we’d be looking for, I’m not certain.

Barry Burden:

I don’t know what the remedy would be at this point. It seems unlikely that a judge would order that an election is rerun.

Zac Schultz:

Professor Burden says one answer is to look to the next election.

Barry Burden:

There may be some remedies that get put in place for future elections. Maybe mandates that are placed on election authorities for the August primary or the November election.

Zac Schultz:

Saks agrees this won’t be limited to this spring.

Richard Saks:

We have to take a very serious look that this could be somewhat of a dress rehearsal for the type of obstacles that voters may face as we go forward to the November election.

Zac Schultz:

Reporting from Madison, I’m Zac Schultz for “Here & Now.”