“We knew it was going to be a gut punch,” BLOC’s Lang said. “No, democracy didn’t win. If you are not able to cast your ballot in a safe environment – there were more cases of people getting sick – this election came with a cost.”
On April 7, election day, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services reported 2,578 confirmed cases of coronavirus. Three weeks later that number had more than doubled to 6,289.
There is a twist to this story, however, and it is a consequential one.
Democrats had been disappointed but unsurprised by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against the extended election deadline. But among the voters who had received absentee ballots, not everyone had heard about it. Absentee ballots – some 79,000 of them – came flooding in after election day. It was shocking to think of the number of votes that were going to have to be invalidated.
But then somebody did a closer reading of the Supreme Court ruling and discovered a subtle, and quite possibly unintentional, discrepancy in language between the SCOTUS ruling and Wisconsin’s election law. While state law decreed that absentee ballots had to be received by election day, the language in the SCOTUS opinion said they had to be postmarked by election day. Since Supreme Court rulings supersede state law, this wound up allowing thousands more ballots to be counted than would have been under the state’s more restrictive law.
In effect, the U.S. Supreme Court itself had altered election rules on the eve of an election.
According to a report published by the Washington Post, Democrats in other parts of the country believe this order could set a game changing precedent, and now they are filing lawsuits seeking similar postmark rules in other states, with the Supreme Court ruling to back them up. In swing states, after all, the matter of a few thousand votes can change the outcome of an election.
Needless to say, Republicans are pushing back.
A month after the election, still appearing somewhat shell-shocked from the experience, Wisconsin Elections Commissioners and staff convened in a Zoom call to discuss lessons learned and how to apply them to upcoming elections.
After first taking time to help the Boomer-generation commissioners overcome some of the user error glitches that seem to bedevil all virtual meetings, Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe was muted but professional in her presentation to the commissioners.
“We learned a great deal about the absentee by mail process which in so many ways is new to us,” Wolfe said. She talked about streamlining the online system for absentee ballot requests, clarifying voter instructions on the absentee ballots, implementing tracking systems on the ballots, and working with the United States Postal Service on better design.
Fortunately, Wolfe told the commissioners, these changes will be paid for with funds allocated to Wisconsin via the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Earlier this year, as part of its economic stimulus response to the pandemic, Congress authorized the allocation of $400 million to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to make payments to states to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus” for the 2020 federal election cycle.
Sustaining some of these processes long term, however, will require additional support, Wolfe said.