This past April, in the lead-up to Wisconsin's spring election, there was a ruckus that, from afar, made no sense. There didn't seem to be much to vote for. Bernie Sanders had already conceded, so the Democratic primary was a dud, and President Trump had no opponents. There was a state supreme court judgeship on the ballot, pitting a liberal, Jill Karofsky, against a conservative, Daniel Kelly, but even a liberal victory would only make a solidly conservative court one vote less so.
And yet the race was all blood and claw. A Republican-backed ad accused Karofsky, a prosecutor, of offering “no jail time for a monster who sexually assaulted a 5-year-old girl,” even though she'd had nothing to do with the sentencing. Karofsky said Kelly displayed “corruption in its purest form.” The other conservative justices on the court took the rare step of condemning Karofsky for being “insulting” and “slanderous,” with no “fitness for this bench.” Then, when the Democratic governor allowed more time for mail-in ballots because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Republican state legislators immediately defied him. They took their fight all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and won.
But there was more here than the usual partisan rancor: A single case from the Wisconsin Supreme Court's previous session had ended in a tie, because Kelly had recused himself. This case turned on a dull bureaucratic process, but one with alarming ramifications. A massive purge of the voter rolls had been planned for 2020, but it was delayed over fears that a lot of legitimate, mostly Democratic, voters would get cut. The tie-breaking vote would decide the timing of the purge—before or after the November presidential election. Karofsky was a likely “after” vote. What happened next made the stakes glaringly obvious. Karofsky won the election, setting the stage for a delayed purge. But then the conservative judge decided to do something so legally bizarre that the very word used to describe his action is not yet in Webster's Dictionary. With three months left in his lame-duck judgeship, Kelly decided to “unrecuse” himself, and suddenly a purge of 129,000 names seemed possible.
The furious maneuvering was testament to what is at stake this year. Wisconsin is a key state for President Trump in the November election, as it was in 2016. That year, he won by the narrowest of victories: 22,748 votes. Now it was conceivable that a single judge in a single case in a single state could determine if Trump kept his job.
Breathtaking voter purges like the one in Wisconsin have become more noticeable these days, in part because they now involve increasingly enormous chunks of voters—often in states and counties with a history of racial discrimination. Last year, North Carolina removed 8 percent of its voters from the rolls in one week. The most scandalous removal to date involved the Georgia governor's race in 2018, when Brian Kemp, then secretary of state, spent the two years before the race purging more than 300,000 voters. That Kemp was also the Republican candidate for governor meant the umpire was also in the game. He squeaked out a win, and to this day his opponent, Stacey Abrams, has refused to concede. Determining how many legitimate voters have been disappeared from voter rolls in these purges has been difficult to measure. After a Virginia election in 2013, one calculation revealed that as many as 17 percent of the purged voters in some counties should not have been. These error rates are not merely distorting the vote but now appear to be affecting outcomes.