The 2021 Primary Election is only two weeks away. The most important election on that ballot statewide is the race for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. See a list of all the candidates and links to their statements, their websites, and their Facebook pages. The statements run long so for a very succinct three bullets about each, see the list at WEAU 13 News.

For lists of candidates for municipal, judicial, and school board elections, follow the links from our Races 2021 page. In many cases there will be no primary for the races because there are few races in which more than two candidates are competing. To request an absentee ballot and to see a sample ballot for your location, visit myVote.WI.gov.

Congressman Tom Tiffany, who represents the 7th Congressional District in Wisconsin, was first elected in a special election held in May 2020. He took the oath of office — swearing to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States — soon thereafter. And he was re-elected on November 3, 2020. But he has since forfeited his right to be a member of the honorable House of Representatives and should not be allowed to return to Congress in January 2021.

When he signed an amicus brief supporting a Texas lawsuit that sought to overturn the November 2020 election and install Donald Trump in the presidency, he broke his oath of office.

As Speaker Pelosi wrote, "This lawsuit ... violates the principles enshrined in our American Democracy.  As the Pennsylvania Attorney General stated in a brief filed against this lawsuit, 'The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.'

"As Members of Congress, we take a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution.  Republicans are subverting the Constitution by their reckless and fruitless assault on our democracy which threatens to seriously erode public trust in our most sacred democratic institutions... (Nancy Pelosi, Dec. 11, 2020).

Grassroots North Shore has opened a petition, to be sent to the House Speaker at the end of December, to voice our view that a person who publicly repudiates the votes and voters of his own Congressional District and the votes and voters of the state he serves does not belong in Congress. Please sign the petition.

Bill Holahan takes us through the most recent jobs report, for a Mythbusters segment on the economy. It's not good news for the country, or for Donald Trump. After explaining why, Bill goes into the remedy for this malaise, and that cure is electing Joe Biden. Bill has the numbers on that.

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Several years ago I was fortunate to sit in on a graduate Political Science class at UWM. The entire focus, even the title, of that class was Fascism. After a great deal of reading, research, and discussion, at the end of the semester we still did not have a definition of ‘fascism’. We asked the professor if he could give us a working definition. In essence, his answer was that fascism is “an apparatus that uses existing things to achieve its goals.”

For our purposes, apparatus can be thought of as a complex structure within an organization or system. Existing things can be institutions, organizations, societies, or people individually or as part of a group. A significant method by which these apparatuses insinuate themselves is frequently co-optation: defined by Merriam Webster as a taking over or appropriation of something for a new or different purpose. Robert Paxton, in his classic 1998 paper "The Five Stages of Fascism," suggests that fascism cannot be defined solely by its ideology, since fascism is a complex political phenomenon rather than a relatively coherent body of doctrine and that we should look to processes, not cosmetic features like flags and uniforms, to understand fascism.

The book, It Can’t Happen Here, released in the mid-thirties by renowned American author Sinclair Lewis, shows us how fascism can co-opt almost anything. In his story one of the first ‘things’ to fall was the Rotary, a service organization whose stated purpose is to bring together business and professional leaders in order to provide humanitarian service and to advance goodwill and peace around the world. Most people think of Rotary as fairly innocuous, but how they were co-opted was astonishing.

Because we cannot be certain that voting in person on Election Day will be safe either for voters or for poll workers, we urge everyone to plan to vote by absentee ballot. (If it is safe, you don't have to use the absentee ballot so you can still vote in person if you prefer.) The dates of the elections are August 11 for the partisan primary and November 3 for the national general election. 

Requesting an absentee ballot online can be frustrating, but it does not have to be. The best way to accomplish the task is to use your smartphone or tablet. In the following illustration, a red arrow signifies a field you must complete. A blue arrow signifies the action to take when you have completed the screen.

Step 1: use an up-to-date browser (older ones are not well supported) and go to myvote.wi.gov.

Step 2: Choose "Vote Absentee" from the menu. The screen should look something like this illustration but it may be formatted differently depending on the device you are using:

Step 3: On the next screen, enter your name and date of birth. The system will then check to make sure you are a registered voter.

Step 4: Assuming you are a registered voter, you will next need to verify your name and address:

Step 5: Select the address you want your absentee ballot sent to. In most instances, you will choose your home address, but college students might well choose an address that is not the one they use when they're at school:

Step 6: On this screen you will choose the election(s) for which you want to vote with an absentee ballot. At this point in the year, you are required to request an absentee ballot for BOTH the August and the November elections. But remember that you can decide not to use the absentee ballot you receive in the mail. You can instead, if you choose, vote in person on election day.

Step 7: You will now be asked to upload a photo ID, usually your drivers license – but NOT A SELFIE!. (Here's a list of acceptable photo IDs.) If you have already done this before, you probably will not have to do it again. But some people have reported that they have needed to complete this step a second time, even though they used the system to request an absentee ballot in the past. Also, if you are using a computer with this system, you will need to take a photo of your ID, send it to yourself (sharing it and emailing it to yourself is usually the simplest method). Then save the photo from your email inbox. At that point, you can use the "Add Files +" button (see below) to upload your picture. If you are having trouble with the photo ID part of the process, please contact the Voter Protection Hotline at 608-336-3232.

If you are using a smart phone or tablet, the screen should look something like this:

After you click the button, the screen should display the following: 

Using the camera in your device, take a picture of your photo ID and then click on "Use Photo."

Step 8: Congratulations! You're done.

Here's a video from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin that shows the steps on a smartphone. For some reason, the sound doesn't play for me (your results may vary) but the dynamic pictures of the screens are very clear. And here's another video, from Citizen Action of Wisconsin. It was made for the April 7 election, but the steps remain the same for every election. Just remember to choose "all elections this calendar year" rather than the April 7 election which is, of course, over and done with!

If you'd prefer to use another method, you can

• Download and print a form, print a copy of your photo ID, and mail both documents to your municipal clerk. You can look up the clerk's name and address on myvote.wi.gov or find it on your municipality's website. Instead of putting your request form in the US mail, you can use a secure dropbox at your village or city hall to turn the documents in.
  
  
• Call, email or fax your municipal clerk. You can find contact information on your municipality's website or on myvote.wi.gov.