Starting TODAY, Wisconsinites will vote on a constitutional amendment on election administration pushed by MAGA extremists and based on lies about 2020.
WisDems recommends voting NO.
Here’s what you have to know, and why it matters.
The background: the proposed amendment contains two questions. The first would ban the use of private funds in election administration. The second would ban anyone not listed in statute as an election official from assisting with an election. Both of these proposals stem directly from MAGA conspiracy theories that have been disproven a bazillion times over, and would create new problems without solving any old ones.
To understand why, you have to dig into the context. MAGA politicians in Madison have been starving the electoral system of funds. Nonpartisan grants have helped fill some of the gaps financially, and election administrators rely on a slew of outside experts, volunteers, and community members to help make elections work. But for the MAGA fringe, the goal is to make sure elections don’t work. When Trump lost in 2020, they didn’t change candidates, or change strategy. They decided to try and change the rules, at the expense of the voters.
Where voters have the last word, voting rights have actually expanded.
Look at Michigan, which has a ballot initiative process—and where voters overwhelmingly voted on expanding ballot access. But in Wisconsin, the only way to get a binding question in front of voters is to pass it through the state legislature—and our state legislature has, since 2011, been utterly rigged by and for the GOP through partisan gerrymandering. Constitutional amendments also aren’t subject to the governor’s veto authority—meaning Governor Tony Evers can’t be Wisconsin’s goalie as he has been for so many of the MAGA GOP’s anti-democratic plots.
You can read the League of Women Voters Wisconsin’s full guide here.
In other words, these questions are brought to you by the same people who spent millions on sham investigations of the 2020 election and, just last week, killed bipartisan legislation to streamline the processing of early and absentee ballots—a measure that would have helped get election results out earlier on election night and ended the late-night absentee counting that is currently required by law and yet is the basis of the false conspiracy theories that gave rise to these amendments.
It’s a sham, and it’s a disgrace. Wisconsin voters deserve better. And change is on the way—our pro-democracy Supreme Court ended the gerrymander, and voters will finally decide which party controls the state Assembly in November’s elections.
But in the meantime, voters will decide on this constitutional amendment. Early vote starts today. Polls close at 8pm on Tuesday, April 2. Vote no, and spread the word—and then recommit to fighting for democracy every chance you get.