Green Bay City Clerk Axed Early Voting Site to Help Republicans

One Wisconsin reveals Green Bay City Clerk's voter obstruction

Open Records Request by One Wisconsin Institute Reveals More Republican Voter Obstruction

From Green Bay comes more evidence of a tactical voter suppression scheme by Wisconsin Republicans engineered through municipal clerks and assorted bureaucrats.

Ari Berman reports in The Nation:

City Clerk Kris Teske, an appointee of Republican Mayor Jim Schmitt, a close ally of Governor Scott Walker, killed the idea of an early voting site at UW-Green Bay offering the excuse that the "city didn’t have the money, time, or security to open an early-voting location on campus or anywhere else."

Notes Berman:

... privately Teske gave a different reason for opposing an early-voting site at UW–Green Bay, writing that student voting would benefit the Democratic Party. 'UWGB is a polling location for students and residents on Election Day but I feel by asking for this to be the site for early voting is encouraging the students to vote more than benefiting the city as a whole,' she wrote on August 26 in an e-mail to David Buerger, counsel at the Wisconsin Ethics Commission. 'I have heard it said that students lean more toward the democrats…. I have spoken with our Chief of Staff and others at City Hall and they agree that budget wise this isn’t going to happen. Do I have an argument about it being more of a benefit to the democrats?'

Yes.

The source revealing the Republican Teske's duplicity are e-mails provided to The Nation following an open-records request by the One Wisconsin Institute, a plaintiff in One Wisconsin Institute v. Thomsen (U.S. District Court of the Western District of Wisconsin (Case 15-cv-324), a major voting rights case in federal court in Wisconsin.

In One Wisconsin, the Republican-enacted law to limit early voting was found to be "pretextual" by U.S. District Judge James Peterson. This means Republicans, and only Republicans, lied, (Mal Contends), (One Wisconisn), (One Wisconsin Institute v. Thomsen).

In federal court, the Republican gig is up. The cooperate media has not quite caught on.

Writes Mark Joseph Stern in Slate in August after an appellate panel let stand Judge Peterson's ruling against the GOP's anti-early voting legislation: "As election law expert Rick Hasen notes, the same panel’s willingness to let Peterson’s ruling stand is rather revealing. Even for these conservative-leaning judges, it seems, Wisconsin’s race-based early voting cuts go beyond the pale. And thanks to their willingness to peer beyond the Legislature’s laughably pretextual justifications for disenfranchisement, thousands more Wisconsin voters will be able to cast their ballots this November."

Wisconsin Republicans continue to fight efforts to allow voters to vote.