A victory for democracy

Yesterday a Wisconsin appeals court reversed a ruling that allowed for the state to purge at least 209,000 people from the Wisconsin voter rolls. This wasn’t so much a victory for Democrats as it was a victory for democracy itself. Sad that the Associated Press framed it as a victory for Democrats because it goes deeper than that. This ruling is about America itself and what kind of nation the United States is supposed to be. The ruling will be appealed by the conservative Republican group (Wisconsin Institute For Law and Liberty) who brought the case to purge Wisconsin voters to the courts.

Donald Trump won Wisconsin by less than 23,000 votes in 2016. Voter ID laws instituted by then-Republican governor Scott Walker (thanks to the Shelby v. Holder US Supreme Court decision in 2013 eviscerating section four of the 1965 Voting Rights Act) profoundly affected the ability of Black people, Asian-Americans, Latinx, Native Americans, elderly and youth to vote. Each of these groups is much more likely to vote Democratic. Trump’s “victory” was aided by Crosscheck, a system that then-Republican secretary of state Kris Kobach created to purge over seven million voters before the 2016 presidential election.

Recently, investigative journalist Greg Palast and his anti-voter suppression team won a huge victory in Georgia. Georgia governor Brian Kemp was ordered by a Federal judge to publicly release the files of over half a million voters purged from the voter rolls in the state.

As South Carolina votes today (63 percent of Democratic voters in the state are Black) in the Democratic primary let’s continue to allow democracy, and the idea of democracy in the United States of America to flourish, not diminish.