Several states in the union have handed over unnerving amounts of power to GOP controlled state legislators when it comes to federal elections. They didn’t get to ratfuck enough of 2020 and they don’t want to miss the next opportunity.
The latest cute trick involves the Wisconsin Election Commission’s attempts to help nursing home patients vote. They want to put people in jail over their efforts, screaming election fraud. This also has the added benefit of calling the commission’s work into question, perhaps to make it easier to sidestep them the next time the GOP wants to send their own slates of electors against the will of the people.
Wisconsin law requires pairs of officials known as “special voting deputies” to visit every nursing home in the state twice to help residents vote. However, during that phase of the pandemic, most nursing homes banned all visitors, including the deputies. And for good reason. It didn’t seem very safe to send these officials and their various hangers-on traipsing from one nursing home to the next, interacting with patients, and possibly spreading the virus.
Therefore, the WEC voted to stop trying to send deputies to nursing homes (where they were already banned) and instead to send absentee ballots to nursing homes. The sheriff alleges that illegal votes were cast because cognitively impaired residents were assisted in voting. This despite the fact that people with cognitive disabilities retain their right to vote in Wisconsin unless a judge determines that they are incompetent.
They’re really reaching.