President Trump's most overt scheme to maintain power in the face of popular opposition is to use the pandemic to suppress the vote. jonathanchait writes
Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images “Mail-in voting is horrible. It’s corrupt,” declared President Trump earlier this week. When a reporter asked how he could reconcile that position with the fact that he had personally voted by mail in the last election, Trump replied, “Because I’m allowed to.” This perfectly circular logic — if more voters were permitted to vote by mail, they would also be “allowed to” — seemed not to satisfy him.
It’s not clear if Democrats have fully grasped the gravity of what Trump and his party are attempting to do. The coronavirus poses a threat to elections in general, but a special threat to urban voters, who tend to face more crowded polling stations. Republicans are very willing to take active measures — like strict voter ID, or the poll tax Florida Republicans have tried to impose — but the virus makes active measures unnecessary.
Many states have contingencies in place for emergencies. Wisconsin — while it had plenty of time to pass new guidelines — does not. That’s a Wisconsin problem, not a Supreme Court problem, not a “democracy” problem, and definitely not a federal problem. If Wisconsin voters want the chance to vote without risking death, they simply need to elect a new legislature that will provide those options. The Wisconsin legislature is itself gerrymandered so heavily that, even though Democrats won more votes in the 2018 statewide elections, Republicans controlled 63 of 99 seats. Wisconsin’s vote was a travesty because the minority-rule Republican legislature calculated that the travesty would benefit Republicans.
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