Shavonda Sisson said she requested a mail ballot to vote in Tuesday's Democratic primary election in Wisconsin well ahead of the election.
WASHINGTON - Shavonda Sisson said she requested a mail ballot to vote in Tuesday’s Democratic primary election in Wisconsin well ahead of the election.
The drama in Wisconsin foreshadows legal battles and political showdowns looming in upcoming primaries across the country, and heading into the all-important November presidential election, as the worst public health crisis in a century upends voting, Democratic officials, non-partisan voter advocates and election watchdogs say.
Some local officials tasked with handling absentee-ballot applications acknowledged to Reuters and on social media that they were overwhelmed by the surge. More than 1,900 voters reported they never received their requested ballots, according to A Better Wisconsin Together, a progressive nonprofit group that asked voters to report missing ballots. Reuters could not independently verify these numbers.
“We want to have elections on the day we pick,” Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of Wisconsin’s Assembly, told a local TV station on Tuesday while dressed in a surgical mask, gloves and a plastic gown at a polling site. “Let people choose their leaders, and then they’ll get the chance to deal with the virus.”
On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union sued Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in federal court over that state’s absentee ballot rules. The complaint alleged that requiring voters to pay their own postage when submitting mail-in absentee ballots and absentee ballot applications was tantamount to a poll tax.
Republicans said that expanding access to mail-in ballots would increase fraud, an assertion that has been repeated frequently by Trump. Virtually no independent evidence has emerged to support such claims. Few states are as potentially pivotal to the outcome as Wisconsin. In 2016, Trump beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by fewer than 23,000 votes, less than a percentage point, in part thanks to a low turnout in heavily Democratic cities such as Milwaukee.
In Milwaukee, a city of nearly 600,000 people that is home to most of Wisconsin’s African Americans, only five polling places were open on Tuesday, a fraction of the usual 180 locations, according to the city’s election commission. Wisconsin’s rules upended mail-in balloting for Jill Swenson, 61, a former smoker who lives alone and has quarantined herself to avoid contracting the novel virus.
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