OP-ED: Wisconsin Republicans Should Stand with Voters to Protect Mail and Absentee Balloting. After All, They Do It Too.

In the November 2024 election, over 1.3 million Wisconsinites cast their ballots either by mail or early in-person absentee. Among those using these safe, legal and secure methods of voting were U.S Representatives and Senators, State Senators and State Representatives.

Recently, Donald Trump has revived debunked conspiracy theories and threatened to radically overstep the bounds of his authority and eliminate voting by mail.

This most recent threat to our freedom to choose our leaders from Trump isn’t just wrong, it’s illegal. That’s because the United States Constitution explicitly empowers states to determine the “times, places and manner” of elections and allows the U.S. Congress to regulate congressional elections.

This is where we, the people, come in. We have the power to ensure our elections are accessible to all eligible voters by demanding the very people we elected to govern in our name explicitly and unequivocally commit to protecting our ability to vote by mail and early absentee voting.

For example, Wisconsin’s 1st District U.S. Representative Bryan Steil is chair of a committee whose oversight responsibility includes federal elections. Steil was also one of the over 183,000 voters in the 1st Congressional District who cast their ballot by mail or early absentee in the November 2024 election. In fact, all but one of Wisconsin’s seven Republican members of Congress cast an absentee ballot in November 2024. The list of absentee voters even includes Republican U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, who seemingly has never met a right-wing conspiracy theory he wouldn’t promote.

State legislators also need to protect our freedom to safely, securely, and conveniently vote in our elections, and they should be held to account for it.

Sometimes it’s taken people power backed by lawsuits to force their hand, like when their decade plus partisan gerrymander finally collapsed last year. But standing up for voting by mail and early, in-person should be easy for the current Republican legislative majority. After all, most of them do it too – since 2018, over 93 percent of Republicans currently serving in the Wisconsin state legislature have voted by mail or early, in-person at least once.

So, if you’re like the vast majority of Wisconsin voters who appreciate our freedom to vote safely, securely and conveniently, contact your state and federal representatives and tell them to publicly proclaim their support for voting by mail or early, in-person. If you don’t know who represents you, go to myvote.wi.gov and enter your address to find out who represents you in Congress and in the state legislature.