It's About Suppression, Con't

Republicans continue to disenfranchise voters across the country, and in nearly every instance it's voters in predominantly black and Hispanic counties. Wisconsin is arguably the most critical battleground state from an electoral college standpoint in 2020, and a Republican judge has just purged nearly a quarter of a million voters from the rolls.

At issue is a letter the state Elections Commission sent in October to about 234,000 voters who it believes may have moved. The letter asked the voters to update their voter registrations if they had moved or alert election officials if they were still at their same address.

The commission planned to remove the letter's recipients from the voter rolls in 2021 if it hadn't heard from them. But Malloy's decision would kick them off the rolls much sooner, and well before the 2020 presidential election.

Before Friday's hearing, Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul said in an interview that quickly removing voters from the rolls would cause "clear harm to Wisconsin voters." That's because some people who haven't moved would likely lose their ability to vote, at least for the time being.

"Any time people have to go through extra steps to vote, and certainly re-registering is a significant additional step, the result is that fewer people end up voting," he said. "Fewer people will be registered. A number of people will have to re-register."

Three voters sued the commission last month with the help of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. They argued election officials were required to remove voters from the rolls 30 days after sending the letters if they hadn't heard from them.

They asked Malloy to issue an injunction that would require election officials to purge their rolls. Kaul, commissioners and others say that would lead to some people getting knocked off the rolls who shouldn't be.

But Malloy went further than issuing an injunction. In granting a writ of mandamus — essentially a court order that a government official or agency do its job — he said he was convinced the commission had a clear, positive, plain legal duty to purge the voter rolls within 30 days.

"I don't want to see someone deactivated, but I don't write the law," said Malloy, who was appointed to the bench in 2002 by Republican Gov. Scott McCallum and has been re-elected by voters.

And of course, the reason these voters are suspect in the first place is because of the state's record system, ERIC.  Wisconsin did the same thing in 2017 with more than a third of a million voters based on ERIC records and found that the vast majority of them had not moved and should have kept their voter registration intact.  Now Wisconsin is doing it again.

Considering we know our Russian friends have broken into state voter registration systems in all 50 states, and that our GOP friends refuse to allow legislation to pass that would strengthen America's defenses against those attacks, it doesn't take a genius to see how it would be easy to de-register and disenfranchise registered Democrats all over the country.

Please check and recheck your voter registration status on a regular basis.  Most states allow you to check online, even Kentucky.

They don't have a flip a single vote if they can keep millions of Democrats from voting at all.