More bad news for democracy from Wisconsin, where a judge has ruled that nearly a quarter-million voters must be purged from rolls before the presidential election.
The voters didn’t respond to mailings asking if they still lived at their current address. The purged voters will fall disproportionately in areas carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016. Donald Trump carried Wisconsin by about 23,000 votes out of almost 1.8 million.
You can guess who’s cheering this court decision, which was opposed by the state’s bipartisan Election Commission. Appeals are planned.
Whether through voter ID laws; Tim Griffin-style voter “caging” to limit votes by blacks in the military in Florida; discouragement of college voting; voting centers that remove precincts from poor neighborhoods; underequipped inner city polling places that produce interminable lines, and other tactics, the Republican Party is moving toward an America where only the right kind of people vote. Can the poll tax be far behind? With Bart O’Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and them on the Supreme Court, precedent means nothing.