Looks Like Wisconsin Was By No Means Ready For Their Primary

Wisconsin held their Primary last week in spite of the Pandemic and now there are claims that thousands of votes are going to be thrown out over a mailing issue. This is hanging chads all over again, but this time they are blaming the post office for not putting dated postmarks on the absentee ballots. This new requirement was recently added by the GOP as they are concerned about counterfeit votes. But post offices were not up to date on this new policy which is causing many Wisconsin voters to lose their vote entirely.

"Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of Wisconsin voters may have their ballots tossed out for the most arbitrary of reasons: because the post office either did not place a postmark on their absentee ballot when it was mailed in, or because that postmark doesn’t have a date.

The reason why stretches back to a surprising decision the Supreme Court handed down the night before Wisconsin’s Tuesday primary election. That case, appropriately named Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, was brought by Republicans seeking to make it harder for many absentee voters to have their ballots counted.

Democrats hoped to defend a lower court order providing that all absentee ballots would be counted, so long as they arrived at the appropriate polling place by 4 pm on April 13. Republicans, meanwhile, successfully asked the Court to impose a new limit on voters — that absentee ballots had to have been postmarked by April 7 or else they would not be counted.

The lower court judge originally extended the deadline to cast ballots because the coronavirus pandemic left many voters unable to vote in person, and forced the state to deal with an unmanageable load of absentee ballot requests.

The Supreme Court split along partisan lines in the Republican case, with all five Republican justices voting for the GOP’s position, and all four Democratic justices in dissent.

As it turns out, the post office does not place any postmark at all on some mail, such as ballots sent via metered mail. In other cases, ballots had postmarks which merely said the ballot was mailed at some point in April of 2020, without giving a specific date. In some other cases, the postmark was too illegible to determine on what date it was mailed.

These problems appear to be widespread. As of Friday, for example, the Madison city clerk said that her office received over 8,000 absentee ballots. Of these ballots, 682 have no postmark. If similar patterns occur throughout the state, that means thousands or even tens of thousands of voters could have their ballots tossed out through no fault of their own."

This ruling does seem on the strict side as it only takes a couple of days to send local mail. Wisconsin should have waited until this Pandemic dies down to properly run this primary. It was foolish to hold it the peak of the pandemic for the United States. But as it stands Sanders dropped out so Biden is going to be facing off against Trump come this November. These primaries at this point are practically for show.