What A Day - Wisconsin's Pandemic Primary

Episode Date: April 7, 2020

Wisconsin will be moving forward with in-person voting today, despite efforts to postpone the election for the sake of public health. We check in on what’s happening there and in other states set to vote soon. Plus, we interview Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes about the election and what this means for November.And in headlines: the ACLU sues to block parts of Puerto Rico’s coronavirus curfew, chaste pandas mate in Hong Kong, and the Mississippi governor makes time to honor fallen racists.

It's Tuesday, April 7th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick. And this is What A Day, your source for all things mask fashion. Honestly, I think that the people in the streets who are wearing masks look better than the Met Ball Gala. And if the Met Ball Gala was going to still happen, they should probably just change the theme to masks. You know, it would be a lot easier for everyone. On today's show, pan-democracy in Wisconsin, and then some headlines. But first, the latest. We got an I-24, I-24. Oh, Richard Blutch is waving a hammer up high. Oh, we got Charles

Kings in the iPad up high. We got two winners. Wow. So that was Matthew McConaughey hosting a Zoom bingo game out of a senior facility in Texas. We love that. I honestly think that this is the height of his acting and talent. I think host abilities give him an Oscar for this. But in serious news, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's condition deteriorated yesterday as he was admitted to the intensive care unit in the hospital. He is one of the first world leaders to be in critical condition from COVID, an unfortunate turn for someone who initially mocked the coronavirus crisis at the beginning of March, stating, quote, I'm shaking hands

continuously. I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody. You'll be pleased to know I continue to shake hands. So we will keep you posted on that. But on this side of the pond, an internal government report highlighted the shortages that hospitals are facing. In the report, hospital administrators said that conflicting guidance from federal, state, and local governments on how to use personal protective gear and other issues has led to, quote, a greater sense of confusion, fear, and distrust among staff that they can rely on hospital procedures to protect them. The report comes from the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services. It's based on interviews with administrators at more than 300 hospitals nationwide and said that equipment provided to hospitals from the federal government

fell far short of what was needed and was sometimes not usable or of low quality. Yeah, and this is something that's obviously been talked about, but now we have an official accounting from inside the administration. Right. So now moving on to our focus for today, what's going on with elections, starting with the hot mess in Wisconsin, where Governor Evers ordered voting to be postponed just one day before the election was set to take place. And shortly thereafter, the Wisconsin Supreme Court blocked his order. So the election will, in fact, take place today with tons of issues. So Gideon, would you like to explain? Yeah, tons of issues is right.

So a quick state of play here. Evers was seeking two very critical things with his executive order. One was the postponement of in-person voting to June 9th and moving the deadline for counting mail-in ballots until then as well. So over the weekend, Evers had called the state legislature in for a special session to work on moving the primary, but the GOP-controlled state legislature refused to budge. So that's why yesterday he tried to just postpone via the executive order. He had gone the other route. It didn't work. But the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided that the governor doesn't have the power to move the election, saying he needs to kick it back to the legislature.

Yeah. And this is all happening while Wisconsin is currently under a stay at home order. Mail in voting would be a great alternative. But, you know, there was also a fight in the courts about expanding and extending their vote by mail program. Yeah. Yeah. Wisconsin Democrats filed a lawsuit to extend the deadline for mail-in voting, given the pandemic and stay-at-home orders in the state. The idea was that more people would need to vote this way, and it would be a scramble to get ballots in oniled in. But then Republicans in the state appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled yesterday that mail-in ballots must be postmarked on Election Day and received by April 13th. So some people still haven't gotten the mail-in ballot they requested. Others might mail theirs in on time, but they can't be sure it's received on time. And that postmark requirement wasn't even in Wisconsin state law in the first place. So they're just throwing spaghetti at the wall,

just trying everything to disenfranchise voters, I guess. Yeah. And while mail-in voting has all of those restrictions on it, in-person voting is not much better. There's obviously extremely curtailed things that are going on there. Thousands of poll workers have said that they will not be showing up today due to their own safety. Which makes sense to me. And in Milwaukee, there's only going to be five polling locations, and that's down from 180.

So, you know, obviously that's crazy for a major city. And we expect to see long lines of people are actually going to be voting because that's just, I mean, a ridiculous fraction of the original number. It's obviously dangerous. Okay, well, let's talk about what is actually up for election in Wisconsin. Obviously, there's a Democratic presidential primary, but there's also local elections as well. Yeah, the big one is this state Supreme Court election between incumbent Daniel Kelly and Jill Karofsky, as well as thousands of other races that are underneath that as well.

Republicans want the incumbent candidate to win and to stay on the court, which currently has a conservative majority. And it's this very court that decided not to allow the governor to postpone the election. So big picture here. Every other major voting contest that was set for April has been postponed or switched over to vote by mail besides Wisconsin. It is a huge outlier. And now you've got this nightmare situation where the conservative majority court has overruled the Democratic governor who can't get around it because of a Republican majority legislature, all for the purpose of retaining and broadening this power despite the health risks that are involved. Yeah, it's just chaos, you know, for voting rights and for public safety. It's just, you're right, a nightmare is the only way to describe it. You know, yesterday, we talked to Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes,

a personal friend of mine, just after the Supreme Court decision came down, and we wanted to get his reaction. You know, the idea that we have this nonpartisan court system is a fallacy. This is a totally political ruling. And we have a very conservative venture in Wisconsin. Unfortunately, we see that lives are not being valued. The lives of people who only want to exercise their right to vote. It is very frustrating that it has come to this. And they are asking citizens, residents of the state of Wisconsin to go out. Not, you know, people go out in blizzards here in Wisconsin to vote.

You know, we weather a lot of literal and figurative storms, but to ask people to go out in the middle of a pandemic to cast a ballot or else your voice won't be heard or else your voice doesn't matter, essentially is what's being told to the voters here in our state. And it's very shameful. And what do you think that people should do now, kind of given all this confusion and essentially weighing the difficulty of wanting to participate in democracy and protect themselves at the same time? Yeah, I mean, that's a I struggle with that. I can't sit here in good faith and ask people to go out there and risk their safety to cast a ballot. That would be very irresponsible of me, almost as irresponsible as the court has just been with this decision that has been handed down. So, you know, if you have your absentee ballot, which I hope you do, please return your absentee ballot.

Make your voice heard. And, you know, now it's putting so much stress on clerks, stress on poll workers, election volunteers. You know, I used the word chaos before. I used the word chaos again, because that's exactly what it is. And I honestly, I do not have the answer. I don't know what to tell people. I don't know what to say right now when it comes to, you know, those who may be questioning whether they should go out to vote or not. And they should be ashamed of themselves for that decision. Right. Does this action sort of worry you about the state's ability to have a safe and fair election come November?

It does give me concern. I mean, I've always been concerned about the way that elections are handled, especially, again, in the age of voter ID laws that swept the nation after Barack Obama's election and many other tactics that have been put in place to prevent people from voting when, you know, it's a shame that they just won't, you know, respond to a changing America. This is a resistance to a changing America. That's why you see all these restrictions that are being put in place instead of saying, oh, well, these are people within our state, within our country. We should be conscious of their needs and we should respond as such, given the fact that we're elected leaders, they are choosing not to and they're deciding to go ahead and just limit who can vote. This is another form of voter suppression and it does not make me sit.

It does not make me comfortable when I think about November. That was Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes. If you have your mail in ballot, make sure you mail it in by today. Indeed. Get to it. Great. So the DNC was supposed to be happening this summer in Milwaukee, but former Vice President Joe Biden has now floated the idea of doing a virtual convention. You know, I just, I feel bad for Wisconsin. This was supposed to be their year. You know, they had the DNC, the Milwaukee Bucks were doing well. Everything got canceled. Any update on making sure, you know, we can vote safely and fairly in November, though?

So something can be a little bit of a light at the end of all of this. Yeah, I mean, we spoke with Senator Ron Wyden a little while back about his legislation on vote by mail with Senator Amy Klobuchar. But in addition to that, Democrats are trying to get vote by mail into the next coronavirus relief package, which Republicans and the president do not want. They have stated as much. In the last coronavirus package, there was $400 million that was allocated for election security grants, which can go towards the expansion of vote by mail and early voting, though that is far from enough, experts have said, to actually help states prepare for this new reality. Right. And voting by mail depends on the Postal Service, which is very quickly running out of money. We're going to talk about that at length in the coming days. But for now, head over to VoteSaveAmerica.com to stay up to date on all the changing deadlines and requirements to vote in

your state. They're keeping track of it so you don't have to. So that's VoteSaveAmerica.com. It's Tuesday, WOD Squad. We got the pod going up. And you know what? It's also time for our daily friend check-in, Giddy. I've been reading lots of articles about how men are dressing up for Zoom. Shout out to the New York Times Style section. So what's been your favorite outfit you've worn to our beautiful Zoom calls? You know, I think it's, for me, more about the outfit that is to come. The day when we all wear our face coverings to the Zoom. I think that's going to be a good check in for how safe we're all being and how stylish we're all being in our homes while being safe.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I haven't allocated any time to thinking about that as a theme for our Zoom calls. We have done other theme days in our Zooms for the show, but maybe we will do a protective equipment Zoom outfit day. I don't know. I think we have to now, but what's your current stay-home fit? I mean, I have honestly never used my yoga pants for yoga. So it seems like they are, you know, this is their Super Bowl. I'm wearing a lot of stretchy pants, a lot of giant sweaters because LA for some reason will not just stay over 70 degrees. I don't get it. My nose is very cold.

But you know what? It's a great, it's a great look. And I'm glad, I'm glad that I have these sweatshirts. It's good to stress test all of our clothes right now. You know,? It's a great look. And I'm glad that I have these sweatshirts. It's good to stress test all of our clothes right now. You know, they could use it. Yeah, I'm just hoping that when we get out of this, we're all dressing like we're on Fury Road or some dystopian future. I want spiky hair, white hair, no eyebrows. I want it to get kind of spooky.

I'm going to have the Furiosa arm myself. I mean, good going. And that was our temperature check. It was super easy. We both feel better forever. Gideon loves his new nickname. And we will check in again tomorrow. Let's wrap up with some headlines.

Headlines. For the first time in U.S. history, the White House labeled a white supremacist group as a terrorist organization. Better hundreds of years late than never. The group in question is the Russian Imperial Movement, a far-right, ultra-nationalist terrorist group which will no longer be allowed in the U.S., and any assets they hold in the country will be blocked. The group gave military training to neo-Nazi fighters and helped carry out attacks targeting migrant communities in Sweden. Now, it's good that the Trump administration

is recognizing the global threat of white supremacy, but there were crickets when a top counterterrorism official was asked about white supremacist groups based in the United States. So the ACLU filed a lawsuit to block parts of Puerto Rico's strict curfew under the current public health crisis. This marks the first lawsuit in U.S. territory related to a COVID-19 curfew. Currently, the law orders people to stay home unless they have an essential reason to leave, and it bans gatherings of people who aren't part of a, quote, family nucleus, which I think means you can share a maximum of five pizzas. I don't know. Police have already cited hundreds for breaking these rules. The ACLU argues that the state doesn't get to decide who forms a

family nucleus and said that the orders are too vague, leaving lots of room for interpretation by police officers who haven't been properly briefed. If it's five pizzas, I am my own family nucleus. Okay, two giant pandas at a locked down Hong Kong zoo successfully made it on Monday for the first time in nearly 10 years together. Congrats to them on a horny quarantine. Guess they feel more romantic when large families aren't walking around taking pictures of them. The pandas, Ying Ying and Li Li, are both 14,

which is above the panda age of consent, and they entered their mating cycle in late March. That cycle is very short and includes just a few days of fertility, which is part of the reason why giant pandas are so bad at mating. Now, I personally identify more with the tortoise at the zoo, who has focused his time in quarantine on lying on his stomach and munching leafy greens. Could not relate less to leafy greens. All right. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves quietly signed a proclamation last week to designate April as the state's Confederate

Heritage Month. Some people use quarantine to write their King Lear. Others use it to write love letters to fucking slavery. Taint Reeves' proclamation came two days after he issued a statewide order shutting down non-essential businesses and ordering residents to stay at home after weeks of overruling cities and towns in Mississippi that were trying to make their own stay-at-home orders. The governor has a lot of loser, I mean Confederate heritage in his personal bio. He was a member of a pro-Confederate frat in college and belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose members claim the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery.

I claim they can catch these fucking hands. These guys should at least be prepared for coronavirus because they already wear big pointy white masks in public. And those are the headlines. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, build us a bear, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just any street sign you can see from your window like me,

What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Cricut.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And enjoy those leafy greens. I'll be slowly moving around the apartment on my stomach eating them. I have given up on the produce hunt so far. My leafy greens are pizza. What a day is a product of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tunn is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein and our senior producer is Katie Long. Our theme music is by Colin Gillillyard and Kashaka.