Walker and rest of GOP doesn't want fair elections - harder to win that way

You may have noticed that the Wisconsin Elections Commission has been sending messages to Governor Walker’s administration and other Wisconsinites that they need more assistance in securing the state’s elections system after Russian interests tried to hack them last year.

That effort continued yesterday as the bipartisan Commission unanimously agreed to request additional staff to improve security before the voters to go to the polls to choose a new Supreme Court justice in the Spring, and vote for Senator and Governor in the Fall.

The commission approved a request for three additional workers at its Monday meeting in Madison. The agency is writing a new elections security plan to put in place for the 2018 elections.

Elections Commission Administrator Michael Haas said if they don't get the employees, they'll only be able to implement parts of the plan.

"We thought three was the minimum we needed to be confident in ourselves that we are putting in place all the best practices that are out there," Haas said….

Gov. Scott Walker cut five new positions for the commission in the 2017-2019 state budget with his veto pen (and the Wisconsin GOP-run Legislature refused to vote to override this veto). He said the commission could function with temporary or contract employees to fill any gaps, but Haas said that can be problematic.

Haas said a 28 percent reduction in staff since 2015 has weakened the ability of elections workers to address voter safety and eroded fulfilling all other state and federal law requirements.

By itself, you may think that this is simply Scott Walker being incompetent and caring too much about having money available for political talking points and WEDC favors over making sure our state’s elections are secure. But then take a look at this interview from Mother Jones over the weekend, and the reasons become a lot darker.

Republican efforts to make it harder to vote—through measures such as voter ID laws, shortened early voting periods, and new obstacles to registration—likewise “contributed to the outcome,” [Hillary] Clinton said. These moves received far less attention than Russian interference but arguably had a more demonstrable impact on the election result. According to an MIT study, more than 1 million people did not vote in 2016 because they encountered problems registering or at the polls. Clinton lost the election by a total of 78,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

“In a couple of places, most notably Wisconsin, I think it had a dramatic impact on the outcome,” Clinton said of voter suppression.

Wisconsin’s new voter ID law required a Wisconsin driver’s license or one of several other types of ID to cast a ballot. It blocked or deterred up to 23,000 people from voting in reliably Democratic Milwaukee and Madison, and potentially 45,000 people statewide, according to a University of Wisconsin study. Clinton lost the state by fewer than 23,000 votes. African Americans, who overwhelmingly supported Clinton, were more than three times as likely as whites not to vote because of the law.

“It seems likely that it cost me the election [in Wisconsin] because of the tens of thousands of people who were turned away and the margin being so small,” Clinton said.

And guess who actively backed and then signed those voter suppression laws in Wisconsin? SCOTT WALKER. As I’ve posited before, there is no question that smaller turnouts in key Dem cities were a big reason behind Trump’s surprising win here, and regardless of whether that’s a direct effect of Walker/WisGOP voter suppression or indifference toward Clinton, the GOP were certainly happy with the results.



That graph gives the game away to me when it comes to why Walker won't add the tiny investment to help guarantee fair elections. Walker doesn’t want Wisconsin’s elections to function properly in 2018, because that chaos and rigging helps him and other Republicans win. This is a guy who is the personification of a Republican Party that doesn’t believe in any concept of “public good”, and believe the best use of government is as a means to grab more money and more power.

Frankly, Democrats haven’t done nearly enough to call this Banana Republicanism out and directly go after it. The Obama Administration and Clinton campaign didn’t actively fight Walker-style voter suppression in ALEC states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania before the 2016 election, likely out of arrogance that Clinton would win and therefore there wasn’t a need to “rock the boat”. How did that work out for us?

Brian Beutler points this out today in an article titled “Grappling With a Legitimacy Crisis”. Beutler argues that ignoring that Donald Trump was AT THE VERY LEAST elected with the help of foreign propagandists and suppressed votes in key states, and that it likely affected Senate and state races as well (hi, Ron Johnson!), is to ignore that American democracy is in big trouble.

But comparably few prominent public figures are willing to suggest Russian interference changed the outcome of the election. Some are reluctant because they don’t want to look like sore losers. Others are reluctant because it implicates their own conduct. Yet more will refuse because nothing less than the legitimacy of the president is at stake.

This explains the credulous and dissonant spectacle of platform monopoly executives, who boast endlessly of the revolutionary power of their products, but now downplay the political impact of the foreign propaganda content that thrived on their networks last year.

It explains why CIA Director Mike Pompeo contradicted the intelligence community (which understand how counterfactuals work) to declare that Russian meddling didn’t sway the U.S. election result, and why the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee began a hearing on Russian social media agitprop with special pleading on Trump’s behalf.

If the U.S. citizenry were immune to foreign propaganda, there’d be no need to conduct any oversight. The implication of the hearing, and of the multiple Russia investigations, is that foreign propaganda can sway voting decisions. But once you acknowledge that, you have to contend with the possibility that foreign propaganda might be capable of swaying enough decisions to tip a close election—and elections don’t generally come closer than the election Trump won. Running away from that inescapable logic sends a clear signal to future saboteurs that American institutions are too paralyzed and self-interested to protect their own elections, which will thus be vulnerable to future meddling and a massive crisis of faith.

Then again, a lack of faith in government and an acceptance of corrupt Banana Republicanism is exactly what slime like Donald Trump and Scott Walker want, so that situation becomes a win for them.

To go along with Beutler’s point, I am having a hard time figuring out an appropriate response to the fact that that we may be in a state and a country with an illegitimate government, elected in no small part through propaganda and election-rigging. And if that illegitimacy cannot be rectified by the constitutional channels of government oversight, voting and impeachment, then the next option becomes a lot worse – and a lot more destructive to many of us.

Let’s not have it come to that, and start to get this cleaned over the next 12 months, shall we?