MADISON, Wis. (CN) — Wisconsin’s governor on Tuesday vetoed six bills passed by the GOP-controlled Legislature that would enact new restrictions on absentee voting in the perennial battleground state.
Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, had long promised to use his veto pen to block any legislation he thought would make it harder to vote, as Republicans in Wisconsin and in statehouses across the nation continue to try to pass new election laws in the aftermath of the 2020 election, many of which aim to restrict access to the ballot box and give legislators more power over the outcome of elections.
“Wisconsin has long been a laboratory of democracy. But in recent years, we have been used as a petri dish for Republican plans to undermine democracy. Well, not anymore. Not today. Not as long as I’m the governor of the great state of Wisconsin,” Evers said in an address from the Capitol rotunda in Madison on Tuesday morning.
Evers, who is running for reelection in 2022, blasted Republicans for abusing their power by attempting to change voting laws and stack the deck in their favor after losing an election they refuse to admit was legitimate.
President Joe Biden narrowly won Wisconsin four years after Donald Trump won the state by roughly the same 20,000-vote margin. Trump and Republican sympathizers sued in a bid to overturn the results of the election but failed in both state and federal court, and a recount Trump demanded in two populous, left-leaning counties affirmed Biden’s win.
Since then, Wisconsin Republicans have been leveraging their majorities in both chambers of the Legislature to pass bills targeting absentee voting, including those that add hurdles to voters casting an absentee ballot and restrict how clerks handle ballots once they are received, in what they say is an effort to restore election integrity by promoting uniformity and transparency.
Republican leaders in the state have also launched two far-reaching audits of the 2020 election. One is being handled by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, while the other is led by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who was handpicked by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R- Rochester, and has previously suggested the election was stolen from Trump without providing any evidence.
A contingent of Wisconsin conservatives visited Arizona’s sprawling election audit as they called for their own reviews, which are expected to conclude in the fall. But some of them say Wisconsin’s audits are not going far enough, evidenced most recently by a GOP lawmaker who days ago attempted to use subpoenas to seize ballots and voting machines from Milwaukee and Brown counties, which the Wisconsin Legislative Council insinuated may be invalid and Evers doubts is even legal.
Vos fired back at the governor on Tuesday in a prepared statement issued after the veto address, saying he was “very disappointed Governor Evers refuses to do the right thing.”
“The governor is making another momentous mistake with his veto pen. While he claims these bills are ‘anti-democracy,’ his actions speak louder than words. He is satisfied with the status quo and refuses to improve future elections,” Vos said, adding that “these bills closed loopholes, standardized procedures, established uniformity, guaranteed only the voter can correct their ballot and protected votes of seniors in long-term care.”
Among other things, the Republican bills would create more paperwork for casting an absentee ballot, require a voter to present photo ID every time they request an absentee ballot, prohibit clerks from correcting minor mistakes on absentee ballot envelopes, bar election officials from mailing unsolicited absentee ballot applications and allow election observers to sit or stand less than 3 feet from poll workers during recounts.
The legislation additionally would restrict who can claim to be indefinitely confined when applying for an absentee ballot-- a system Republicans claim was exploited during the 2020 election amid the pandemic-- and would have made incorrectly claiming to be indefinitely confined a felony.
Evers used his veto power in June to block a law that would curtail the use of money from private individuals or organizations to administer elections, something Republicans have harped on since the Center for Tech and Civic Life, an outfit bankrolled by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, gave more than 200 state municipalities cash to run their elections last year, including $6 million that went to the state’s five largest cities.
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