The Wisconsin Supreme Court delivered a serious blow to Democrats after rejecting the left’s redistricting map and adopting one drawn up by Republicans for the state’s upcoming elections.
The state’s highest court made its decision last week after the U.S. Supreme Court in March threw out the voting map for state elective offices drawn up by Wisconsin Democrat Governor Tony Evers.
With its 4-3 decision Friday, the state court issued its ruling so late that state Democrats will likely not have have time to try and fight the implementation of the Republican-crafted districting plan for the 2022 midterms, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
Gov. Evers called the court’s ruling an “outrageous” and “unconscionable miscarriage of justice,” and went on to hyperbolically claim that “our democracy is under near-constant attack.” The court’s decision is actually a defense of democracy under the law.
BREAKING: Today’s redistricting decision by #SCOWIS is outrageous. At a time when our democracy is under near-constant attack, the judiciary has abandoned our democracy in our most dire hour. This is an unconscionable miscarriage of justice. My full statement here ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/jVjJpyr4AT
— Governor Tony Evers (@GovEvers) April 15, 2022
Friday’s decision affects only state legislative offices, the Journal-Sentinel reported. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Evers’ plan for congressional districts in March.
While it seems a lock that the GOP voting plan will be used for the 2022 elections, the state Democrats are still mulling continued court challenges against the redistricting map for 2024, according to the Journal-Sentinel.
Despite apparently being stuck with the maps for 2022, the Democrats still claim that the GOP-created map violates the federal Voting Rights Act.
The argument started after Evers released his plan. State Republicans had objected to the governor’s map because it increased Milwaukee’s black-majority districts from six to seven, even though the city’s black population did not grow to justify adding a district, the Journal-Sentinel reported.
Meanwhile, the new map approved by the courts goes in the opposite direction by reducing the black-majority districts in Milwaukee from six to five.
In the end, the state’s high court said that Evers failed to prove his case.
“The Governor did not present evidence of a (Voting Rights Act) violation, despite drawing maps on the basis of race. He produced no evidence of electoral history and no district-specific evidence demonstrating that the black communities he moved among districts would be denied the opportunity to effectively participate in democracy absent his proposed district lines,” Chief Justice Annette Ziegler wrote in the court’s decision, the Journal-Sentinel added.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Jill Karofsky, writing for its minority, claimed that arbitrarily increasing the black districts in Milwaukee was justifiable based on the city’s purported “history of forced segregation” that reduced the political influence of blacks in Wisconsin. Neither the court’s majority, nor the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with that assertion.
Indeed, Milwaukee was a focal point for suspected manipulation in the 2020 election. Milwaukee and the surrounding areas, including Racine and Kenosha, were the recipients of more than $8 million in grants issued by leftist Facebook chief Mark Zuckerburg for the 2020 election cycle. The grants were described as “an election bribery scheme under Wisconsin law,” according to a report by special counsel Michael Gableman.
“And by targeting important jurisdictions with large Democrat vote potential with greater financial resources, opportunities were given to some voters that weren’t made available to all Wisconsin voters,” Gableman exclaimed.
It was also alleged that several Milwaukee officials took “Zuck Bucks” as bribes during 2020.
The Thomas More Society, a conservative law firm based in Chicago, alleged that former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and City Clerk Jim Owczarski sought $3.4 million for a get-out-the-vote scheme to increase absentee balloting in their jurisdiction.
There were numerous other problems with the 2020 election in the Badger State, too.
For instance, the margin of victory for Biden over Trump dwarfed the 2016 results of Trump versus Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
“Vice President Joe Biden carried [Milwaukee’s districts] in 2020 with 3,768 votes to President Donald Trump’s 2,883— a margin of 885, or eight times what it was in 2016, when Trump earned 1,904 votes to Hillary Clinton’s 2,012,” Milwaukee City Wire reported in November of 2020.
That same month, WISN-AM talk show host Dan O’Donnell reported that county and municipal clerks and poll workers in Wisconsin may have illegally changed mail-in ballots all across the state.
O’Donnell wrote that Wisconsin state law requires that all mail-in ballots must have a witness’s signature and the witness’s home address to be valid and to be counted in an election.
“The statute is very, very clear,” O’Donnell quoted retired Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman as saying. “If an absentee ballot does not have a witness address on it, it’s not valid. That ballot is not valid.”
But O’Donnell wrote that he’d been informed by sources that many county and municipal clerks who handled these ballots simply “filled out witness signatures themselves.”
“Acting on false and unlawful advice from the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), these clerks may have inadvertently invalidated thousands of absentee votes,” he wrote.
Then there was the highly suspicious flood of 250,000 Wisconsin voters suddenly requesting special voting status in 2020, a jump of more than 170,000 requests over previous elections, as reported by the MacIver Institute, a conservative think tank based in Madison.
Ahead of the election, Wisconsin was flooded with a quarter-million voters who all of a sudden applied to be allowed as “indefinitely confined” to their homes, a status that let them avoid the state’s voter ID law, the institute reported.
A quarter-million Wisconsin voters now say they're "indefinitely confined," and therefore exempt from the #VoterID law. pic.twitter.com/vJJuAsMQiT
— MacIver News Service (@NewsMacIver) October 28, 2020
We may never know the number of improprieties committed during the 2020 elections, but at least in Wisconsin one small measure to help the vote better reflect truth and reality has now been implemented.
The question is, do Republicans elsewhere have to spine to force the issue like Wisconsin’s GOP just did.
