Mon. Mar 18th, 2024

From today’s Washington Post:

An appeals court has temporarily halted the purge of more than 200,000 people from Wisconsin’s voter rolls, in a case that set off a bitter fight over voting rights in a swing state that will be fiercely contested during the 2020 presidential race.

The Tuesday order came one day after the state’s elections commission and its three Democratic members were found in contempt of court for not complying with a judge’s previous order to cancel the registrations of roughly 6 percent of its voters.

The case is largely split along partisan lines. Republicans argue that thousands of people who have changed addresses have not updated their voter registration status and should therefore be struck from the rolls to ensure election integrity, while Democrats and voting rights advocates say the move will unjustly disenfranchise swaths of the electorate — particularly low-income voters, young people and people of color, who tend to lean left.

A similar struggle has also played out in Georgia, where rolls were culled by more than 300,000 overnight last month, and in Ohio and Texas — spotlighting countrywide accusations of voter suppression in the run-up to the presidential election.

In Wisconsin, where President Trump won by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016, party officials are following the legal saga closely, aware that their state may play a decisive role in November. If voters are removed from the rolls, state law allows them to re-register up to and on Election Day.

On Tuesday evening, Trump traveled to Milwaukee for a campaign rally and was still reveling in his victory as he took the stage, telling the crowd, “I’m thrilled to be back in Wisconsin, where we had a very big night a few years ago.”

But it was liberals, who had resolved to continue fighting the purge on Monday, that cheered Tuesday as news spread that the state’s rolls would remain intact. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty — a conservative law group that sued to have the registrations pruned — said the ruling doesn’t change its argument.

Read the complete article here.

By Editor